Originally posted by Kemosabe
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A Developer Hacked AMD's GCN GPUs To Run Custom Code Via OpenGL
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Originally posted by Kemosabe View PostWhat exactly is a GPU based OS supposed to be?
The hard part is building a firmware board for it. You need to fab your own PCH for the thing and it would probably require custom silicon for the GPU and ram to interface properly as a system hub. But radeonSI is really just another CPU architecture, one with its own ISA and hardware characteristics you can write an OS for. The software parts are already there, and tech wise our GPUs are sophisticated enough to perform the role.Last edited by zanny; 30 November 2015, 08:39 PM.
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Originally posted by zanny View Post
The GPU is turing complete. The only real barriers to it acting as a CPU are its lack of bus control (they only speak PCIE and video outs) and the need for firmware to boot "to" it. But its actually completely doable - we have the ISA, we know how ata / pci / usb work, we can write drivers for those, but you need a better compiler infrastructure than OpenCL for that - you would want to have a systems programming language for the GPU where control flow is designed around parallelism and transparent pipelining.
The hard part is building a firmware board for it. You need to fab your own PCH for the thing and it would probably require custom silicon for the GPU and ram to interface properly as a system hub. But radeonSI is really just another CPU architecture, one with its own ISA and hardware characteristics you can write an OS for. The software parts are already there, and tech wise our GPUs are sophisticated enough to perform the role.
Practically it's a bad idea, because you don't have privilege levels that would protect your OS structures from application code.
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Originally posted by OneTimeShot View PostPresumably the byte stream verifier in the Kernel should prevent anything malicious being loaded from userspace (?) A moderately amusing hack while waiting for Vulcan that will basically support this type of thing officially, I suppose...
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Originally posted by OneTimeShot View PostPresumably the byte stream verifier in the Kernel should prevent anything malicious being loaded from userspace (?) A moderately amusing hack while waiting for Vulcan that will basically support this type of thing officially, I suppose...
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