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> GPUs need to be first-class players in the OS I've been starting to wonder, taking a crazy-stupid extreme, whether a GPU unit should be in charge of booting.
by a9h74j 5y ago
> GPUs need to be first-class players in the OS
I've been starting to wonder, taking a crazy-stupid extreme, whether a GPU unit should be in charge of booting. Perhaps you boot into a graphical interpeter (like a boot into BASIC of old) which can then implement a menu (or have "autoexec.bas") to select a heavyweight OS to boot into.
- GauntletWizard 5y agoYour Raspberry Pi already does :) https://thekandyancode.wordpress.com/2013/09/21/how-the-raspberry-pi-boots-up/ https://thekandyancode.wordpress.com/2013/09/21/how-the-rasp... More seriously, there's probably something to this from a motherboard design perspective, there's enough general purpose compute on a modern graphics card to do the initial bootloader stuff. But graphics cards are not standardized as much as CPUs are, so it's unclear if it would work as we've currently designed systems.
- a9h74j 5y agoGreat link for this, thanks. I had suspected some different ordering might already be called for given the need for e.g. RAM training. That [version of?] pi booting is much more filename-oriented than all of the partitioning I have seen documented for a Rockchip [ http://www.loper-os.org/?p=2295 http://www.loper-os.org/?p=2295 ].