John Martin wrote:
HOWEVER, AMD *is* finally getting around to implementing a GPU in the
same package as the CPU, so we'll shortly be able to see a combined
CPU/GPU thing that sits in an AM3 socket (or, more likely, a C32
socket). There's even a possibility that AMD's talked about where an
advanced GPU will live in a second CPU-style socket, with direct HT
connections. This sort of design at least leads itself to being used
as a co-processor, as it has direct low-latency connection to the
memory contoller/bus.
Again, in the context of ZFS I don't believe data transport
is the big problem to solve. I believe it is a kernel space API.
Do we have any indication any of the GPGPU vendors (NVIDIA/ATI/Intel)
will offer an API that can be called from kernel space?
Nouveau uses KCS (kernel command submission) which would allow this, but
the problem is that then you have to deal with relocations. Our driver,
and I believe Nvidia's, use UCS (user command submission) to simplify
this and get better performance.. Porting TTM (memory manager
implementing GEM interface) and other things was a huge downside to
Nouveau and it would be very difficult to go back to that.
What sort of API would you specifically need though?
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