The first question that comes to mind when looking at them is "why they are so huge?". For example libcuda.so from cuda 10.1 has size 28Mb and from 13.1 already 96Mb. So I rejected the idea that they are just yet another victims of vibe-coding and made some preliminary RE. The answer is - because they contain in .rodata section lots of CUBIN files for
kernel run-time
I extracted them (archive from 13.1) and checked SASS. Now I am almost sure that nvidia has some internal SASS assembler - they use LEPC instruction (to load address of current instruction) which you just can't get from official ptxas
/*0160*/ LEPC R20 ; R20 now holds 170
/*0170*/ IADD3 R20, P0, R20, 0x50, RZ 1 ; and if P0 R20 += 0x50 What contain those CUBIN files?
- syscalls like __cuda_syscall_cp_async_bulk_tensor_XX, __cuda_syscall_tex_grad_XX etc
- implementation of functions like cudaGraphLaunch/vprintf
- functions cnpXXX like cnpDeviceGetAttribute
- logic for kernel enqueue
- some support for profiling like scProfileBuffers
- trap handlers
