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Is cuda support decent on BSD? Drivers for niche stuff seem like they would be an issue as well.

mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
No idea, never needed it. At some point I decided I had no use for dedicated GPUs that justified dicking around with atrocious driver blobs. That might change in the future if I get more into ML though.
- galangalalgol 4y ago
  I get that, mostly I use them for dsp for software defined radios. The drivers for those are probably hard to compile as well. Depedencies on libusb often. Or dpdk for the nice ones.
  - mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
    I'm still holding out hope that Intel will put out a decent dGPU with a strong ML story within a few gens, with gloriously open source drivers. Recent news coming out of Intel the last week or so haven't been encouraging though. But I will remain a dreamer.
    - scheme271 4y ago
      AMD is probably a better bet with ROCm although it's still pretty spotty right now in regards to support.
  - mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
    Btw, dunno much about software defined radios and such but I'm curious. Isn't this the kind of niche FPGAs are perfect for? Or do they not justify their cost in your use case?
    - galangalalgol 4y ago
      Purchase price yes, development costs less so. Maybe I'm just bad at verilog but it takes me a lot longer to do the same thing compared to cuda or c++. Also the devtools are a big pain, and nothing is performance portable across device brands. Or even device classes. But yes, for high rate simple-ish dsp, fpga is awesome for performance and performance per watt.
adrian_b 4y ago
NVIDIA is the only GPU vendor who makes device drivers for FreeBSD, not only for Linux, so their GPUs work better than the others on FreeBSD. Unfortunately the FreeBSD NVIDIA driver does not include CUDA. It might be possible to use CUDA in a Linux VM with GPU pass-through, but I have not tried this. FreeBSD has good driver support for many server-oriented devices, e.g. for many network cards, especially for those from Intel, and for many SCSI controllers. The support for magnetic tapes is also better than in Linux. There are various random devices that may have good support, e.g. recording from a Logitech video camera worked much better for me on FreeBSD than on Linux, but in general the chances of not finding a device driver for some piece of hardware are much greater than on Linux, especially when that hardware is new.

No idea, never needed it. At some point I decided I had no use for dedicated GPUs that justified dicking around with atrocious driver blobs. That might change in the future if I get more into ML though.

galangalalgol 4y ago
I get that, mostly I use them for dsp for software defined radios. The drivers for those are probably hard to compile as well. Depedencies on libusb often. Or dpdk for the nice ones.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
  I'm still holding out hope that Intel will put out a decent dGPU with a strong ML story within a few gens, with gloriously open source drivers. Recent news coming out of Intel the last week or so haven't been encouraging though. But I will remain a dreamer.
  - scheme271 4y ago
    AMD is probably a better bet with ROCm although it's still pretty spotty right now in regards to support.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
  Btw, dunno much about software defined radios and such but I'm curious. Isn't this the kind of niche FPGAs are perfect for? Or do they not justify their cost in your use case?
  - galangalalgol 4y ago
    Purchase price yes, development costs less so. Maybe I'm just bad at verilog but it takes me a lot longer to do the same thing compared to cuda or c++. Also the devtools are a big pain, and nothing is performance portable across device brands. Or even device classes. But yes, for high rate simple-ish dsp, fpga is awesome for performance and performance per watt.

adrian_b 4y ago

NVIDIA is the only GPU vendor who makes device drivers for FreeBSD, not only for Linux, so their GPUs work better than the others on FreeBSD. Unfortunately the FreeBSD NVIDIA driver does not include CUDA. It might be possible to use CUDA in a Linux VM with GPU pass-through, but I have not tried this. FreeBSD has good driver support for many server-oriented devices, e.g. for many network cards, especially for those from Intel, and for many SCSI controllers. The support for magnetic tapes is also better than in Linux. There are various random devices that may have good support, e.g. recording from a Logitech video camera worked much better for me on FreeBSD than on Linux, but in general the chances of not finding a device driver for some piece of hardware are much greater than on Linux, especially when that hardware is new.