FreeBSD, GPGPU and OpenCL/CUDA

[Gautham Ganapathy]

On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 6:10 PM, b. f. <bf1783 at googlemail.com> wrote:
>
> Okay.  Maybe we'll see a convergence of the two in the medium/long
> term.  Right now, interested parties need to look at the available
> hardware, and then talk to the vendors about whether they would be
> willing to support a port of their software to FreeBSD, and
> _specifically_, what is needed.  For example, we faced a similar
> situation with the newer Nvidia GPUs not so long ago.  Some key
> developers like John Baldwin got involved, and determined what changes
> needed to be made in the FreeBSD base system in order to support the
> newer hardware and graphics drivers.  It would have been nice to get
> an open-source driver, but since Nvidia wasn't willing to do that,
> FreeBSD  chose to meet them half-way.  Probably a similar effort will
> be needed for CUDA.  Someone should look at the requirements, and have
> a _detailed_, _sustained_ discussion with Nvidia and the FreeBSD
> Foundation.  If, for example, KMS is needed, then the Foundation may
> be willing to invest in that, because it will probably also be needed
> for new graphics drivers and Xorg, anyway.  Robert Noland was working
> on it, but he was doing it largely by himself in his spare time, and
> then he got a new job and had to slow down considerably, if not stop
> altogether.
> ...

Hi

I remember seeing a post sometime back (either here or on nvnews)
about someone getting a prebuilt linux-based CUDA application to work
freebsd's linuxulator. Does this mean that the driver is ready, and
just the toolchain has to be ported?

Regards
Gautham Ganapathy