There is a question I have about the drivers for AMD gpu’s that I don’t see answered anywhere I searched. I can confirm with a pacman query that I do have the appropriate mesa dirvers installed, but I don’t know how to confirm that they are actually in use. But when opening the mhwd GUI tool it lists 3 possible drivers for my AMD gpu: video-linux, video-modesetting and video-vesa. What are these exactly? Are they all mesa?
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The open source AMD video drivers (video-linux) are provided by the kernel. Older cards use the radeon driver, newer cards use the amdgpu driver. Mesa provides the DRI driver for 3D acceleration.
If you’re not sure which is in use, you can run inxi -G.
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Thanks! The inxi command did clear up how to check the active driver.
So (if I understand this correctly) video-linux is a collection of drivers provided by the kernel that includes the radeon and amdgpu drivers for older/newer gpu’s respectively.
Also, now I have a followup question about mesa. Is it a “stand alone” driver such that it does what amdgpu does with the addition of acceleration features OR is it supplemental like an optional dependency of a package?
It’s also still unclear to me what drivers video-modesetting and video-vesa represent.
Sorry if the questions are dumb, but I’d rather ask dumb questions instead of not asking at all about things I don’t know.
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They’re generic drivers you’d never want to use with AMD graphics. Search the web if you want to know more. I never cared to know more than that. 
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