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 I do not want myself having lots of outdated hard- and software running and developing on outdated platforms.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.
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