AMD HSA Support Finally Appears Ready To Be Merged In GCC

It looks like the merging of AMD HSA (Heterogeneous System Architecture) support into the GCC compiler is imminent.

For months we have been covering the HSA patches for GCC and their hopes of getting the code merged for GCC 6. Feature development on GCC 6 is over, but there still is the possibility of release exceptions and this HSA support would be new functionality that can be optionally enabled.

SUSE has been working in cooperation with AMD on this HSA support inside GCC, thanks to the German company's compiler experts. Martin Jambor of SUSE posted a new GCC patch thread today entitled Merge of HSA branch. He commented:

This is hopefully the last big re-post of the HSA patches. We have incorporated all the feedback and found and fixed a couple more bugs. The complete patch-set bootstraps and tests fine on an x86_64-linux, when you do not enable HSA, there are a few expected warnings when HSA is enabled which I will address as a followup together with more testsuite changes. The patches were specifically designed so that the impact on pople not enabling HSA should be minimal. A last round of complete testing on an actual HSA-capable APU is still underway and I won't have the results until tomorrow but preliminary results were good and I did not want to hold up these patches for any longer.

The libgomp, omp and configuration bits have been reviewed by Jakub, a few other bits by Richi, but still Honza should review the IPA parts and I suppose someone other than me should ack the hsa-* files, even though I probably now have the authority to do it myself.

Thanks everybody for patience and feedback. While we are of course opened for mor more of it, let's also hope the approval process will finish soon as it should now.

The patches provide an HSA libgomp plug-in for run-time with hooking into GCC's OpenMP library, an HSA register allocator, and the necessary changes for providing HSA offload support. New GCC options relating to HSA are: --with-hsa-runtime, --with-hsa-runtime-include, --with-hsa-runtime-lib and --with-hsa-kmt-lib. Besides a supported compiler, you also need to be using a recent kernel that's equipped with the AMDKFD driver and on your system have the new HSAKMT library. AMD's John Bridgman should be able to comment more in our forums on other requirements and details about this HSA support for the GNU Compiler Collection.