4.2. OpenStreetMap tools
While OpenStreetMap data files can be processed directly using the OGR <Datasource> this only really works out for rather small files / areas.
To cover larger areas, and especially the full planet, OSM data is usually pre-processed and stored in a database more suitable for processing by a renderer.
The two main tools used to do so are osm2pgsql and imposm, with the former one seeming to be the far more popular one by now.