A Developer Hacked AMD's GCN GPUs To Run Custom Code Via OpenGL

[GreatEmerald]

Uh, so it's a welcome back to the times of assembly-based shaders? Doesn't sound very practical to me.

[OneTimeShot]

Presumably 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...

[dungeon]

What exactly is a GPU based OS supposed to be?

GPU based OS should be if you have working fully functional OS kernel on the GPU, instead of the CPU.... but i don't think there is the one

Best currently known combination is HSA - where GPU is coprocessor of the CPU... but that is GPU a like based OS

[Kemosabe]

What exactly is a GPU based OS supposed to be?

[agd5f]

Just a cool thing.

[Daktyl198]

Any security issues with this or is it just a cool thing?

[agd5f]

Or he could have just hacked the open source driver directly and saved some time?

[phoronix]

Phoronix: A Developer Hacked AMD's GCN GPUs To Run Custom Code Via OpenGL

A Phoronix reader pointed out an interesting slide deck that's gone relatively unnoticed up until now about a game developer "Hacking GCN via OpenGL" for allowing some interesting possibilities...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMD-GCN-OpenGL-Hack