I should mention I thought about the layout of a GPUfs some time ago. I
just lack lots of knowledge about this, the gist was to write shader
(code or compiled?) into some files, also write image data and mesh data
to other files, abd reading results from other files. But as I said, I
lack lots of knowledge about how GPUs work and never wrote any OpenGL
code myself, only shader code. It always seemed like it's hundreds of
hundreds of lines of code to draw a triangle (which is the basic hello
world program).

sirjofri

22.08.2021 12:04:41 Frank D. Engel, Jr. <fde101@fjrhome.net>:

> While not necessarily unwelcome as a possibility, I don't think
> GPU-based drawing/gaming is as relevant to this discussion (or as
> important of a goal for Plan 9 / 9front) as is GPU compute (GPGPU).
>
> The ability to leverage GPU resources across CPU servers for
> computation purposes would be of great benefit to the platform, and
> working out a driver interface by starting the process remotely via
> drawterm seems like a sensible step in that direction.
>
> On 8/22/21 3:07 AM, sirjofri wrote:
>>
>> 22.08.2021 05:16:42 Eli Cohen <echoline@gmail.com>:
>>> deep learning is another interest of mine too. hardware support is a
>>> big deal for that... some kind of support for GPUs would be nice.
>>> people have discussed that for years... hardware drivers are
>>> difficult
>>> and important to do correctly!
>>>
>>> I always really liked the "XCPU" and drawterm type ideas of using
>>> other OSes for their existing strengths along with Plan 9. maybe
>>> drawterm could have a GPU device driver or something... that being
>>> said I have sometimes found it ends up surprisingly easier doing it
>>> all on Plan 9...
>> That's also something I thought about a few times already: drawterm
>> with GPU support. The only issue I see is, for realtime applications
>> like games the draw times would be network bound and thus pretty slow.
>> It would work for heavy GPU applications where almost no draw calls
>> will exist (no textures, very low poly meshes, ...), but for heavier
>> stuff we'd need to address that.
>> That's the benefit of a native driver: you could calculate the server
>> side (heavy CPU calculations) on a cpu server, the client/frontend
>> side (including draw calls) on a terminal and the pure graphics on the
>> GPU.
>> I'd still give the drawterm GPU a shot. Maybe I can set drawterm up
>> for compilation on my work PC (two GTX 1080Ti) and try figuring out
>> how to do all that stuff. However, I've never done graphics
>> applications on windows or somewhere else that uses OpenGL or DirectX
>> (I'd try OpenGL because portability), only written shaders so far.
>> I'll surely need some time (which is always rare as a game developer).
>> Btw I don't know the exact specifications for GPU usage for neural
>> networks. I assume it's all compute shaders? Maybe it's even a kinda
>> blackbox, put stuff in (draw call), read things out. I assume this can
>> work perfectly fine for draw times, depending on the data.
>> sirjofri

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