LLVM/CLANG and several OpenCL projects: FreeBSD or any *BSD developer involved?

[Julian Elischer]

On 10/20/11 11:30 PM, Hartmann, O. wrote:
> As I'm not a developer, but for scientific purposes highly interested in
> using GPUs, the only way of doing HPC computing at the moment is with
> nVidias TESLA/nVidia consumer graphics cards and LINUX, since on Linux
> one willing to use the GPU has the necessary libraries, driver and
> compilers.
>
> I'm hoping that *BSD, at least FreeBSD, is involved in the ongoing
> development of LLVM and especially CLANG, since I see a great chance to
> get GPGPU stuff via OpenCL into one of the systems.
>
> Today I stumbled, while searching for news regarding to open and free
> OpenCL/LLVM based implementations into several announcements on Phoronix
> (see phoronix.com). There are is a very interesting project in
> Saarbrücken, another has just announced  an open and BSD-style licensed
> library and I hope there are more projects popping up next time. It is
> awesome how fast now the community is focussing on CLANG and OpenCL.
>
> The pitty is all of these projects are highly Linux related and I see
> not one BSD-like development movement in that part. It seems, as *BSD
> developers are hiding or being passive waiting for until Linux stuff
> gets ready and then adapting it. this makes me feel strange, since this
> is the typical behaviour of always being in "the second row".
>
> My question is simple and easy: Is there any *BSD ambition to
> participate on the development of any free implementation of OpenCL free
> libraries and, obviously, the more important thing, to implement some
> kind of kernel facility, the OpenCL stack, into FreeBSD or any *BSD to
> make the BSD claims loud and clear in the community?
>
> For me personally, the situation becomes a little bit unsatisfying,
> since for my scientific work I drift more and more into Linux, which
> provides with the very good stuff provided from nVidia OpenCL, compiler
> and even high performance graphics chips. As I now has to provide also
> administrative tasks for some Linux systems, I won't go deeper into my
> resistance having also Linux on my desktop or even as a backbone for my
> infrastructure.
>
> To make is short. Can someone provide informations or some details in
> how any *BSD developer is, if, involved in the development of an OpenCL
> stack, free libraries or even OpenCL CLANG frontend/LLVM backend? Are
> their chances to get also FreeBSD atop the list of GPGPU capable
> operating systems in a near future?

The problem is manpower.
In any Open Source project, the developers do wha thtey need to be 
done, and with Linux there is
someone interested in working on almost anything you care to imagine.
For FreeBSD, there are a lot of people,  but there are always going to 
be things that
are covered by Linux that we just don't have people to work on.

It IS possible that there are enough people out there in the BSD world 
intersted enough in this to
work on this but they may be doing it on their own for their own reasons.



> Thanks a lot for your patience and I'd like to apology for bringing up
> this stuff repeatedly.
>
> Oliver
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