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Old 11th November 2015
notooth notooth is offline
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Talking GPU Programming on OpenBSD?

Hi everyone,

I am wondering if it is possible to develop an application on GPU for better performance. If there is one, please let me know where I can find the tutorial.

Thank you
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Old 11th November 2015
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To my knowledge, you would be the first to write an application to use GPU processing power for other than graphics on this OS. If so, you would be the one writing tutorials.

GPUs are controlled via kernel drivers, driven through X.Org software, packaged as "Xenocara" for this OS.

Kernel driver documentation is in applicable man pages. Xenocara documentation may be found in /usr/xenocara/README, which describes the OpenBSD-specific packaging and the build controls available to those who wish to do X development.

None of that documentation will help you with GPU programming.
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Old 11th November 2015
e1-531g e1-531g is offline
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To my knowledge user space programmers use languages dedicated to writing programs which can use GPGPU. One of them is OpenCL. I was said that open source support for OpenCL is poor, even in Linux. Support is prepared via State Trackers in Mesa.
Mesa is part of OpenBSD's xenocara repository, but Mesa is not X.Org.
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Old 12th November 2015
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Quote:
Originally Posted by notooth View Post
Hi everyone,

I am wondering if it is possible to develop an application on GPU for better performance. If there is one, please let me know where I can find the tutorial.

Thank you
BSDs in general are not usable for scientific computing except in very specific circumstances. I just finished the configuration of new GPU computing node we acquired for our Lab (4 Tesla K80 4992 Acura processors per card). It runs Springdale 7.1 Linux Princeton University clone of Red Hat. The latest ROCKS 6.2 cluster distro is based of CentOS 6.7. These days Red Hat and Ubuntu are the only choices when it comes to scientific computing. I personally like better Red Hat which is the only real choice for clusters, Hadup, Spark and similar. OpenBSD is ok if you need only TeX, Python, R and vanilla C (GSL). I have not used Atlas, BLAS, LAPACK on OpenBSD recently so I am not sure about the state of those ports.

Solaris was OK until 2005-2006

I just checked Atlas, BLAS, LAPACK ports. They are in the sorry state. I am not sure if the lack of man power is the only problem or if there are genuine technical reasons for obsolete ports. If you are interested in Scientific computing stick to Red Hat

Last edited by Oko; 13th November 2015 at 01:00 AM.
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Old 15th November 2015
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This is probably OT, but I think that the best short term venue for GPGPU on alternate operating systems may be via the new SoC board vendors, who seem to be more open about releasing drivers (and some open source drivers). The MALI GPUs have good support for usage as GPGPU, and they're used on a number of SoC boards (such as Odroid). I don't know about RasPi. But, right now, (I think) you could do GPGPU on an Odroid with Linux or Android. In any case, I think the path to making those drivers available for non-Linux is easier on ARM and is perhaps less obstructed with these newer companies.

Of course, that requires an ARM port of OpenBSD to the SoC board of interest. So far as power goes, it's just a matter of clustering these low cost devices, as done for bitcoin mining.
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