PathScale To Port Nouveau To OpenSolaris

[phoronix]

Phoronix: PathScale To Port Nouveau To OpenSolaris

Over the past few years more of the Linux graphics stack has moved within the Linux kernel so that there is finally a proper kernel memory management solution for the open-source graphics drivers and to also provide kernel mode-setting. Moving more of the GPU driver code into the kernel DRM results in a more secure environment as the X Server can now run without root access, the start-up process is cleaner and faster with KMS, the performance will ultimately be better with a memory manager, there's more reliable and faster VT switching, suspend and resume is better, and the list of benefits just goes on...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=NzkxNg

[V!NCENT]

Solaris, the 'scientific' OS.

Two questions:
1. Why Solaris? What good is it compared to Linux?
2. Why not just improve the driver, the OpenCL state tracker and go with OpenCL instead?

Nothing against their efforts, but it totally doesn't make any sense to me...

[wswartzendruber]

My understanding is that Sun is about to die unless this Oracle thing goes through.

[chithanh]

European Commission has approved Oracle purchase of Sun

Besides, OpenSolaris is free/open source software so anybody can continue to develop it, even if Sun goes bankrupt.

[wswartzendruber]

European Commission has approved Oracle purchase of Sun

Besides, OpenSolaris is free/open source software so anybody can continue to develop it, even if Sun goes bankrupt.

Would you invest in an old and diseased dog if it was free and open?

[Michael]

PathScale is going to be providing Phoronix with their 2010 road-map concerning this work and other areas... Stay tuned.

[airlied]

European Commission has approved Oracle purchase of Sun

Besides, OpenSolaris is free/open source software so anybody can continue to develop it, even if Sun goes bankrupt.

I'm not sure anyone else has shown a willingness to invest that much in it, since its completely hosted by Sun and they seem to have no interest in non-Sun ppl contributing without placing lots of barriers in their way.

maybe if Sun had done more community investment it might have helped.

Dave.

[frische]

(Let's keep in mind that Dave Airlied is employed by Redhat.)

I wonder though what PathScale hopes to gain over the proprietary nvidia driver for cuda computations. Is the proprietary driver that bad?

[kraftman]

(Let's keep in mind that Dave Airlied is employed by Redhat.)

From everything I heard about Open Solaris development it seems Dave is right. Probably that's why many people are laughing when someone says Open Solaris is developed by community or it's a community project.

[codestr0m]

(Let's keep in mind that Dave Airlied is employed by Redhat.)

I wonder though what PathScale hopes to gain over the proprietary nvidia driver for cuda computations. Is the proprietary driver that bad?

Realize that nouveau is only a small part of a much larger stack. There's a front-end, compiler backend, runtime and execution environment. The nouveau kernel driver is just a portion of this that we'll tightly couple with the other parts we're working on. Regardless of the current state of nvidia driver we need source access to properly provide support. With an open source driver for Linux,FreeBSD and or OpenSolaris we can take an honest look at a few things:

1) Can the memory management between host and gpu be improved for compute applications
2) How much runtime overhead is involved with the binary blob
3) Proving to nvidia that open source development is serious and should be invested in
4) Does the security model for CUDA applications need to be improved?
....

Today CUDA is targeted at relatively small markets like HPC, but in the future it may be increasingly important to have answers.

./C