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

O. Hartmann ohartman at zedat.fu-berlin.de
Mon Oct 24 11:46:48 UTC 2011


On 10/24/11 12:44, Eduardo Morras wrote:
> At 12:21 24/10/2011, Ivan Voras wrote:
>> On 21/10/2011 08:30, 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.
>>
>> Drivers are still a big problem on FreeBSD. AFAIK neither NVIDIA nor ATI
>> supply GPGPU-enabled drivers for FreeBSD. If this problem were solved, I
>> think that most of other utilities would mostly "just work" using
>> standard interfaces like OpenCL.
>
> Nvidia freebsd driver has cuda enabled. But you need the sdk to compiled
> c/cuda to lowlevel cuda/asm (don't remember name now) that driver
> executes on the gpu. Afaik nvidia freebsd driver hasn't opencl support
> but this knowledge comes from "i don't use (tm)" opencl, so i maybe
> wrong. The sdk works for Windows, Linux and MacOSX. ATI has retired
> ati-stream and ati-tometal languages and support opencl in windows and
> linux using a llvm private compiler.
>
> Some days ago, a llvm opencl opensource project started (ati's one is
> not opensource)
>
> http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvmdev/2011-October/044266.html and
> https://launchpad.net/pocl
>

You need the OpenCL libraries and the nvcc compiler to run OpenCL code. 
nVidia doesn't provide any of them natively for FreeBSD.

There is a "hack" for the 32bit Linuxulator capable of executing 
OpenCL/CUDA binaries, compiled within a 32bit compatible Linux 
environment utilizing the 32bit SDKs provided by nVidia, but the whole 
thing looks a bit messy, since I have never got a working solution and 
it seems more effort to me to install a complete working Linux environment.

Having an open source solution would be great, but those projects are 
quite immature.
I'd like to see some LLVM stuff with the nVidia PTX assembly backend 
also usable in FreeBSD, so there may be a chance getting a quite decent 
nVidia support and OpenCL working on FreeBSD with that.

AMD is completely out of focus now. Once they promised "free" drivers 
but at the moment they seem more closed than nVidia.


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