How interfacing with graphics card work with C or C++?

Question

Libraries such as OpenGL access the graphics card and can produce graphics programs, how does these libraries access the graphics card since they are implemented using C. According to what i've heard, C and C++ do not provide graphics features built in the language and producing graphics requires libraries. How then are these libraries written in C? The same question applies for sound also?

Are additional features to C/C++ languages such as graphics, sound, internet access written in lower level languages and then provided to the C/C++ using libraries?

I would be thankful for any summary which correct my concepts, or any suggested readings on the web or books.

Answer 1

OpenGL is not really a library. It's a specification. The opengl32.dll or libGL.so you have on your system are merely very thin layers, that communicate with the GPU driver.

According to what i've heard, c and c++ do not provide graphics features built in the language and producing graphics requires libraries. How then are these libraries written in c?

The operating system offers functions to talk to the hardware. A driver uses those facilities to drive (hence the name) the hardware. For example writing a sequence A, B, C, D may make some particular GPU draw a triangle to the framebuffer.

I explained those things already in On Windows, how does OpenGL differ from DirectX? and here How does OpenGL work at the lowest level? (I'm including a verbatim quote here):

This question is almost impossible to answer because OpenGL by itself is just a front end API, and as long as an implementations adheres to the specification and the outcome conforms to this it can be done any way you like.

The question may have been: How does an OpenGL driver work on the lowest level. Now this is again impossible to answer in general, as a driver is closely tied to some piece of hardware, which may again do things however the developer designed it.

So the question should have been: "How does it look on average behind the scenes of OpenGL and the graphics system?". Let's look at this from the bottom up:

1. At the lowest level there's some graphics device. Nowadays these are GPUs which provide a set of registers controlling their operation (which registers exactly is device dependent) have some program memory for shaders, bulk memory for input data (vertices, textures, etc.) and an I/O channel to the rest of the system over which it recieves/sends data and command streams.

2. The graphics driver keeps track of the GPUs state and all the resources application programs that make use of the GPU. Also it is responsible for conversion or any other processing the data sent by applications (convert textures into the pixelformat supported by the GPU, compile shaders in the machine code of the GPU). Furthermore it provides some abstract, driver dependent interface to application programs.

3. Then there's the driver dependent OpenGL client library/driver. On Windows this gets loaded by proxy through opengl32.dll, on Unix systems this resides in two places: * X11 GLX module and driver dependent GLX driver * and /usr/lib/libGL.so may contain some driver dependent stuff for direct rendering

   On MacOS X this happens to be the "OpenGL Framework".

   It is this part that translates OpenGL calls how you do it into calls to the driver specific functions in the part of the driver described in (2).

4. Finally the actual OpenGL API library, opengl32.dll in Windows, and on Unix /usr/lib/libGL.so; this mostly just passes down the commands to the OpenGL implementation proper.

How the actual communication happens can not be generalized:

In Unix the 3<->4 connection may happen either over Sockets (yes, it may, and does go over network if you want to) or through Shared Memory. In Windows the interface library and the driver client are both loaded into the process address space, so that's no so much communication but simple function calls and variable/pointer passing. In MacOS X this is similar to Windows, only that there's no separation between OpenGL interface and driver client (that's the reason why MacOS X is so slow to keep up with new OpenGL versions, it always requires a full operating system upgrade to deliver the new framework).

Communication betwen 3<->2 may go through ioctl, read/write, or through mapping some memory into process address space and configuring the MMU to trigger some driver code whenever changes to that memory are done. This is quite similar on any operating system since you always have to cross the kernel/userland boundary: Ultimately you go through some syscall.

Communication between system and GPU happen through the periphial bus and the access methods it defines, so PCI, AGP, PCI-E, etc, which work through Port-I/O, Memory Mapped I/O, DMA, IRQs.

Update

To answer, how one interfaces the actual hardware from a C program say a OS kernel and/or driver written in C:

The C standard itself treats addresses as something purely abstract. You can cast a pointer to uintptr_t, but the numerical value you get is only required to adhere to pointer arithmetic if cast back to the pointer. Otherwise the value may be unrelated to address space. The only safe way to implement hardware access to C is by writing the lowest level stuff in assembly, following the ABI of the used C implementation and system.

That's how all proper OS do it. Never addresses are cast into pointers in C! The operating system has implemented this in assembler, matched to the C compiler of the system. The code written in assembly is exported as functions callable in C. The kernel provides those functions then to the GPU driver. So the chain is:

Application Program → [OpenGL API layer → Vendor OpenGL implementation] → GPU driver → OS kernel → Hardware.

Answer 2

If I am not mistaken, you question boils down to how does one use C to access hardware. The answer, in a very general and hand wavy fashion, is that peripheral hardware is often mapped into the address space and accessed as if it is normal memory with the caveat that it can change unexpectedly.

C does a great job of accessing memory so it is totally suitable for reading and writing directly with hardware. The volatile keyword is there to explicitly stop the compiler from taking short cuts and force querying the addresses in question. This is because memory mapped IO addresses can change unexpectedly and do not behave like normal RAM.

On a simple system this low level memory access to set addresses will be abstracted into a more easily usable library. On modern operating systems, the kernel must mediate access to shared resources like a graphics card. This means that the kernel will implement the memory mapped IO but also put in place a series of system calls (often using Swiss Army Knife constructs like ioctl) so that a user process can gain access to the peripheral. This in turn will be wrapped in a nice user-friendly library like OpenGL.