> i'm not sure how much people realize that the modern "graphics driver" is actually just "the kernel multiplexes userspace messages to/from the GPU and we've t

> i'm not sure how much people realize that the modern "graphics driver" is actually just "the kernel multiplexes userspace messages to/from the GPU and we've taught mesa to understand each family of GPU you'd ever care to support." In the case of OpenGL, it has a fairly sophisticated state tracker, which you can carry around with you. For example, I can statically compile ANGLE this way. But even OpenGL/Vulkan have a shader compiler that's unique to the hardware (it's expensive to carry it around with every piece of hardware in the universe). And I'm not even talking about libdrm, which is quite tightly tied to the kernel version. I know exactly what I'm talking about, because I can also statically compile Mesa into my application.