Re: [9fans] Drawterm GPU (was: Software philosophy)

[Paul Lalonde <paul.a.lalonde@gmail.com>]

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I'd love to see  GPU support for Plan9.  This discussion falls right into
my professional capacity.  I'll say that people generally *grossly*
underestimate the complexity of a modern GPU and of its supporting software
stack.  The GPU driver is effectively a second operating system with shared
memory and DMA interfaces to the host.  Even bringing up a modern GPU for
just compute tasks is a very large endeavour.

That being said, if you want real hardware support, the best place to start
is currently AMD's open-source stack.  Ignoring the Vulkan bit,
understanding their platform abstraction layer (PAL) and shader ISA (
https://developer.amd.com/wp-content/resources/Vega_Shader_ISA_28July2017.pdf)
is the base.  The lower hardware levels are reasonably well-described in
linux's libdrm and its AMD support in amdgpu.

Opinions on how to bring this to Plan9?  I don't really have any - it's a
huge pile of work with minimal benefit.  If you're looking for lightweight
graphics, WebGL is a doable path, and almost certainly the right way to
experiment with Plan9-like interfaces to graphics hardware.

Paul



On Sun, Aug 22, 2021 at 5:30 AM sirjofri <sirjofri+ml-9fans@sirjofri.de>
wrote:

>
> 22.08.2021 14:10:20 Stuart Morrow <morrow.stuart@gmail.com>:
> > Also:
> >> people have discussed that for years
> >
> > They have?  I mean I might have seen occasionally someone vaguely
> > going "some sort of GPU support would be cool to have".  That isn't
> > discussion.
> 
> I've even heard of someone actually making GPU stuff work on plan 9. I've
> only heard from their partner, who made a cute glenda thing on a piece of
> cloth. I chatted with her a little and told her she should encourage her
> partner for some discussion about this in our channels. It looked like
> it's some academic work, but I don't know any details about it.
> 
> Worst case, someone already has a proper and good GPU implementation for
> Plan 9 and nobody knows about it.
> 
> sirjofri
> 
> Btw if the said person reads this: it would be nice to learn some
> details.

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