Re: x11/nvidia-driver (340.24/340.32/343.13): nvidia BLOB doesn't recognize any display socket on Lenovo E540/UEFI and FBSD CURRENT

From: O. Hartmann <ohartman_at_zedat.fu-berlin.de>
Date: Sun, 28 Sep 2014 13:00:13 +0200
Am Sun, 28 Sep 2014 12:05:36 +0200
Jan Kokemüller <jan.kokemueller_at_gmail.com> schrieb:

> 
> On 28.09.2014 11:41, O. Hartmann wrote:
> > Without nouveau driver, FreeBSD people do not have the slightes chance to play with
> > OpenCL/libclc on nVidia's hardware.
> 
> Some time in the past it was possible to run CUDA/OpenCL Linux binaries 
> with the Nvidia driver in Linux emulation mode on FreeBSD:
> 
> https://web.archive.org/web/20121015180221/http://blogs.freebsdish.org/jhb/2010/07/20/using-cuda-with-the-native-freebsdamd64-nvidia-driver
> 
> Not sure if that still works though.

Well, I went through this stuff that time and from the date, you can see its four years in
the past! There was also thast promising thing from Pathscale, HMPC ast promising thing
from Pathscale, HMPC or similar, now OpenACC. But at the end it was a "dream-bubble".

And as far as I know: even the Linuxulator is ways behind the recent development and
still 32Bit (ancient, so to speak). I do not want myself having lots of outdated hard-
and software running and developing on outdated platforms.

And it is even worse: some new technology utilizing LLVM, libCLC, most recent MESA libs
and the most recent opensource graphics driver provide rudimentary OpenCL support for the
GPU - but as I stated in the thread concerning the missing WiFi Intel 7260 support -
FreeBSD hasn't even the xf86-video-nouveau driver anymore which is supposed to work best
in that scenario.

I had very longish discussions in 2010 about this subject - from a naiv non-developer
point of view. I was always told, FreeBSD is an OS for servers and we all know, that
servers do not rely on graphics hardware that much as it is important for graphics
workstations and not at least desktop machines.
But what we faced five years ago in science regarding the rapid development of OpenCL and
GPGPU showed me very ckearly that GPU hardware is becoming dramatically important. With
AMD providing powerful iGPUs and now Intel doing the same, number crunching isn't the
domain of physicists and numerical geeks anymore, GEGL starts to incorporate OpenCL and
GIMP is about to utilize the GPU as well. BLENDER is utilizing CUDA in Linux and I guess
OpenCL is also on the way. And if this isn't convincing: I read about cloud computing
with massively parallelized TESLA backends, a typical domain of dump and unexciting
hardware and their operating systems. And guess what? The key is obviously the support of
the graphical functionality, not necessarily the X11 desktop it self.

The project that time in 2010, where we were supposed and inclined to use FreeBSD as the
development platform for a highly parallelized application for planetary science imaging
was then based on OpenSUSE and Ubuntu Linux and OpenCL. From a simple naive point of
view, I can not express deeply enough how excited I was when I saw, how fast the
combination of CPUs and GPUs using OpenCL coding could be. What was done in an expensive
and professional manner on expensive hardware was developed and tested on cheaper "gaming
riggs" and even on those platforms the boost was tremendous. But not with FreeBSD! All
Linux.

I think FreeBSD will find its niche in the embedded networking hardware market as long as
it still has the faster network stack. But since the Linux folks started to attack this
domain in a disgusting PR-ish way, I doubt that even this will last long. Or FreeBSD will
show its power with colourless databases.

One of the reasons why FreeBSD is still on top of the list of the OSes is the fact of its
deep ZFS incorporation - as Matthew Dillon once said: it saved FreeBSD's ass. Well,
Dillon developed then HAMMER and showed once again, that the effords in the BSD field are
spread all over the area and thinning out as times passes. For FreeBSD, the day when Linux
will have its ZFS in-kernel will be devastating - I guess.

Received on Sun Sep 28 2014 - 09:00:53 UTC

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