Re: Intel Haswell support - Any updates?

On Fri, 18 Sep 2015 16:00:41 +0930
Shane Ambler <FreeBSD_at_ShaneWare.Biz> wrote:

> On 18/09/2015 02:51, Shawn Webb wrote:
> > On Thu, Sep 17, 2015 at 07:00:15PM +0200, Jean-S??bastien P??dron wrote:
> >> Hi everyone!
> >>
> >> I'm very sorry I didn't communicate at all on the i915 update project.
> >>
> >> So here is a status update: since this morning, the driver builds fine.
> >> I'm currently attending the XDC (X.Org Developers Conference) and don't
> >> have an Intel laptop to test with me. However, Johannes Dieterich (also
> >> attending the conference) offerred his help, so we will do that today.
> >>
> >> Obviously, do not expect something stable in the coming couple days.
> >> Thank you for your patience :)
> >
> > First of all, I want to say (nay, YELL!) "THANK YOU!" You're doing a
> 
> +1
> 
> >> Now about other related tasks:
> >>      o  A Mesa update will be committed Real Soon Now?. It will unlock
> >>         GLAMOR and OpenCL support.
> >
> > OpenCL on FreeBSD would be stupendously amazing!
> 
> A little off-topic but has anyone tried to get nvidia to return libcuda
> to our drivers? While it was there a few years ago it was removed yet
> again. From what I could tell we had to use the linux sdk to compile
> cuda kernels which probably hindered freebsd using it so the sdk may
> need porting to freebsd as well.
> 
> 

I'm not sure I'm talking about the same subject, but a couple of years ago,
when we moved software for satellite imagery processing towards GPUs and had
CUDA as an option in mind, I looked at FreeBSD support. nVidia was per se
unwilling to offer FreeBSD-native CUDA libraries and support. the only way to
get CUDA to wark was to use the Linuxulator and being stuck with 32bit
libraries. 2009 and 2010, when i tried hard looking for a solution, the
mentioned workaround wasn't working properly anymore on FBSD 9, 10-CURRENT.

It is a long time since I put some thoughts in that direction since we
switched over to OpenCL as a more free, flexible platform (CPU and GPU usage,
even alternatively).

But of speaking about history then, we had to retire the FreeBSD server
project in favour for a CentOS and Suse cluster due to the lack of driver
support for OpenCL on FreeBSD. The decision was made quickly because funding
was quick and decisions depended on most recent hardware (TESLA GPUs that
time, some customer nVidia GTX570 and GTX580 cards which had a limited
livetime of the GPGPU processing pipeline due to the driver, but sufficient
for some minor calibration jobs ...).