The FreeBSD NVIDIA driver *does* expose the underlying UVM (unified memory) kernel interface CUDA needs. shkhln's libc6-shim translates the ioctls, which is why people have gotten CUDA workloads running — and the route that's matured most is running a Linux user space under the Linuxulator. As of 2026 there's active work (NapoleonWils0n's freebsd-cuda) running Linux CUDA applications on FreeBSD by mounting the host's Linuxulator NVIDIA libraries into Podman/Rocky Linux containers, so the driver lives on the FreeBSD side and the container doesn't need its own. Ollama, PyTorch, and similar have been confirmed working that way. So CUDA-on-FreeBSD effectively exists today, but as a Linux-compat construction rather than a native toolkit — fine for headless/batch, clunkier as a clean desktop Blender story. FreeBSD <https://forums.freebsd.org/tags/cuda/>
ROCm and oneAPI are in worse shape than CUDA, not better. ROCm depends on AMD's amdkfd kernel compute driver, which isn't in drm-kmod, and the userspace is famously bolted to specific Linux kernel versions. oneAPI needs Level Zero plus intel-compute-runtime, again Linux-kernel-coupled. Neither has a FreeBSD port, and there's no upstream effort I'm aware of to make one. Mario. On Sun, Jun 21, 2026 at 6:59 PM mghackerlady <[email protected]> wrote: > Ah, silly me. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it running in a > linuxulator? Not a massive issue if so, but I was interested in native > support > > On 2026-06-19 16:23, Mario Marietto wrote: > > ---> Hello! I'd love to run FreeBSD as a workstation OS, and am wondering > if there are any plans to support CUDA > > FreeBSD already gained the support for CUDA : > > > https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/can-cuda-be-installed-on-freebsd-now.85879/ > > On Fri, Jun 19, 2026 at 11:15 PM Maple <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hello! I'd love to run FreeBSD as a workstation OS, and am wondering if > there are any plans to support CUDA or some other GPU compute platform like > oneAPI or ROCm? It'd be useful for blender users like myself, and while I > doubt there are many people considering FreeBSD for CAD or video editing > workloads, it'd give FreeBSD a foot in the door there. > > I can also see FreeBSD being used for render farms should one of these > technologies be adopted, but I am a desktop user interested in other things > (hence the desktop mailing list) so perhaps there's something else that > would prevent that > > > > -- > Mario. > > > -- Mario.
