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Idea Raised For Reducing The Size Of The AMDGPU Driver With Its Massive Header Files

Following the weekend news of the AMDGPU kernel driver becoming too large that it's causing the Plymouth boot splash screen on slower Linux systems to time-out, longtime AMD Linux graphics driver engineer Marek Olšák expressed a new idea for helping to reduce some bloat from this AMD kernel graphics driver.

Other user-space software depending upon the header files like Mesa and the UMR debugger can fetch from that dedicated repository rather than from within the kernel source tree. Marek also proposes a Python script that could trim all the header files and only keeping around the definitions actually used by the AMDGPU driver source code. AMD Linux engineer Mario Limonciello also added on the FreeDesktop.org thread that the x86 CPUID expected output data documentation is going through a similar transition of moving to an external centralized database and then will periodically sync with the kernel source tree.

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