I have a response from an anon poster on the Linux sub on Reddit that may or may not be well informed (take it with a pinch of salt), but their posts were ostensibly more popular than my queries about amdgpu's mooted bloat, is there anyone here who can make sense of their points as to their legitimacy?
>That's nothing. First of all, majority of it is in header files as >initialization data and various tables, and the second thing is that > it's >more compartmentalized as compared to radeon (read: there is a lot of >duplication). > >Memory wise, the cost of the 'bloat' is laughable. And code path wise it's >quite comparable to radeon. You don't execute every > single byte of code >just because it's there. You hit some code paths often, some rarely, and some >never. Critical paths are the > ones you want to optimize the hell out of. > >Code bloat is a different thing. Usually it refers to layers upon layers of >abstraction and crufty interfaces that no longer really > fit, but are kept >for various compatibility/legacy reasons. And even then, it doesn't >necessarily translate to performance > penalties. Usually bloat is >something that hits developers rather than users, since large messy codebase >is difficult to > maintain. > >P.S. There is nothing in modern AMD GPUs that makes them unsupportable by >older radeon driver per se, specs are > completely open, >nothing prevents you from coming up with your own 'slim' driver. It's just >that it has been decided that, > moving on, new hardware support will be >added to amdgpu only. The size of amdgpu results from deliberate architectural > > approaches. > >First rule of any optimization every dev should know: profile, profile, >profile! Without careful measurements you cannot make > proper assessment of >performance, even very experienced devs get bit by that when making casual >assessments. > >If you feel you can trim it down, you're welcome to remove code you deem >unnecessary and submit patches to the tree. Those of us who have a bloaty mainstream browser with Javascript enabled can read the whole exchange at https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/7u54d3/lisa_su_we_are_ramping_production_of_gpus/dtkcysq/?context=3 -- Patrick Harper paia...@fastmail.com
