Cracking Windows Open: Porting RADV to Win32

userbinator•about 6 hours ago

Developing our own KMD is not really an option

Why not? Fully open-source Windows GPU drivers would be great. Incidentally, this sort of "glue code" is probably something LLM assistance could help greatly with much of the grunt work.

(E.g. there is already a generic framebuffer driver for Win3x/9x: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47646363 but one of the ideas I have --- which anyone else with the time is more than welcome to attempt --- is to port the existing open-source Linux drivers for AMD/NVIDIA/Intel to early Windows versions that never even had closed-source drivers available, giving them full 2D/3D acceleration. Theoretically, something as crazy as CUDA on Windows 95 is possible, and perhaps some vibecoding can turn that into reality. After all, as I write this comment, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49089814 is on the main page.)

AshamedCaptain•about 1 hour ago

I am quite sure AMD is already using a fork of the Linux amdgpu KMD for their proprietary driver on Windows (which in part explains why a project like this can even be done)

Porting Linux drivers to anywhere is generally hard. It either makes your kernel very Linux-like (and lots of manpower to translate the abstractions), or forces you to put Linux on it. There are bazillions of projects to put recent Intel drivers on 9x and none suceeded, for example.

Plus my recent observation that for Haiku it was easier to port the out-of-tree nvidia driver and fork Mesa, than it was to port the Linux amdgpu one.

MayeulC•about 3 hours ago

I almost wrote the same comment — the first part, anyways.

In theory, it should be feasible to provide a "shim" to bridge the API gap between Linux and Windows internal APIs. The catch here is that Linux is a moving target.

AMDGPU (the Linux kernel module) has its roots in a shared Linux/Windows codebase from AMD, so hopefully it didn't get _too_ tightly integrated (I know some parts got integrated, IIRC it used to ship its own i2c driver).

ZiiS•about 4 hours ago

For Windows 3x/9x the common term was VxD, KMD strongly implies an NT derived OS.

pjmlp•about 4 hours ago

Not only that, Windows NT driver model already changed at least twice since Windows XP, on Vista and Windows 10.

LoganDark•about 5 hours ago

You can't really develop a kernel-mode driver nowadays without being an incredibly large OEM. Otherwise, you won't be accepted by any anti-cheat.

Maakuth•about 5 hours ago

An anti-cheat app would probably be quite surprised to find it's running on Windows 95 anyway.

not_a9•about 2 hours ago

If anti-cheats actively whitelisted drivers playing competitive video games would be impossible for people using any rarer HW/utilities. Vulnerable drivers are generally blacklisted when found.

Getting your driver signed seems like a pain these days, yeah

inigyou•10 minutes ago

Yes this is how they work. You use a mainstream GPU or no game for you!

nananana9•about 2 hours ago

I'm inclined to believe this is exactly what happens, given that both Bluetooth and my printer stopped working the last time I tried playing a Riot game.

Also got a BSOD in vgk.sys, and it left a bunch of junk in my EFI partition after I uninstalled it. Fun times.

LoganDark•about 2 hours ago

Maybe drivers are treated differently, but I remember having to update Windows 11 to play ARC Raiders because my specific version was old enough that system files did not pass their whitelist check. It told me which system file failed the check - I don't remember which it was exactly, but it definitely wasn't one that'd ever been modified, just one that wasn't recent enough it seems, at least going off of how updating fixed it.

Almondsetat•about 3 hours ago

So we should throw away the possibility entirely just because of a few videogames? That doesn't sound reasonable at all, considering most videogames don't have anti cheats and GPUs can be used for way more stuff than playing.

ChocolateGod•about 5 hours ago

Wireguard...

not_a9•about 2 hours ago

Sandboxie/WinFSP/KVM guest drivers for Windows are open source too

I’m sure there are more open source examples. A newer one is https://github.com/namazso/PawnIO/tree/master I guess?

grim_io•about 4 hours ago

Wireguard is blessed by Microsoft, who sign their drivers.

pjmlp•about 4 hours ago

Certainly OpenGL and DirectX acceleration was a thing in Windows 9x, kind of missing the point.

nananana9•about 2 hours ago

Videocards of the era only did exclusive fullscreen - you could not for example use OpenGL to render your windowed application's UI, that was all software.

pjmlp•about 2 hours ago

My graduation thesis was porting a particle visualisation engine from NeXTSTEP into Windows 9x.

madhu_ghalame•about 3 hours ago

A compatibility matrix showing supported GPUs, Vulkan features, and current limitations would help developers evaluate the project.

Cracking Windows Open: Porting RADV to Win32

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