this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2024
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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Windows has fully user space graphics drivers since Vista. Linux still utilizes kernel modules and I'm not aware of plans to move everything to user space. It's honestly pretty cool that entire graphics driver can crash under Windows and all that happens is a bit of flickering.
Are you sure? It seems like WDDM has a user-mode "User-mode display driver" - which looks to me like the HW-specific part of Mesa: it's invoked by the D3D runtime - and a "Display miniport driver", which is in the kernel.
See https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/display/windows-vista-and-later-display-driver-model-operation-flow
That said, no doubt Linux's ability to reset drivers is way, way behind... We're coming up on 20 years since Windows could recover from a graphics driver reset reliably without losing the desktop, and only partial hacks exist on Linux today.
I really need to get around to building a sample HTML page to show how unsafe having WebGL enabled on Linux browsers is. One long shader, and your desktop is a goner.
I'm not a Windows system architect but I see the Radeon driver on my iGPU under Windows crash all the time in reproducible scenarios.
The only time the system can recover is when the display compositor crashes (Wayland)