Comment by tamat
13 hours ago
Great work, I would love to have the skills to do something like this, but I can see you had to read lots of specifications to achieve this and thats my weakest point.
One silly question you may know: Imagine you wanted to use GPU acceleration, even in the smallest form. How hard would it be to build a driver for the GPU? Do you think there is good documentation about it?
Umm that's probably the extreme end of OSDev which I likely wouldn't be able to do, at least not for a driver you can buy. Qemu's emulated GPU is documented decently and could be possible, but things like nvidia GPUs are badly documented (and until recently, the docs were fully closed source) - even Linux has issues with this (and I actually see a few other hobby OS devs who just use Linux's GPU drivers in the end). There aren't a lot of things I've marked as near impossible but writing a genuinely decent GPU driver for a common GPU isn't really something I imagine I'll ever be able to do sadly.
The docs for intel’s integrated offerings seem pretty good, I’m planning to do a driver for those on my toy OS. Anything else is hit and miss in terms of availability of information unfortunately.
thanks for your response. Thats what I heard but I was wishing things to change...
I was also thinking about integrated GPUs like the one in a RPi or other SoCs