AMD HSA kernel driver

http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1407.1/02923.html

by ferrari8608 • 12 years ago

152 22 12 years ago

lkml.iu.edu

I'm curious when we'll begin to see HSA implemented on ARM devices, too - next year?

Sanddancer• 12 years ago

Given AMD's announced roadmap[1], I'd say it's more likely to come in 2016. Next year, they'll still be doing mostly stock ARM cores.

[1] http://www.anandtech.com/show/7990/amd-announces-k12-core-cu...

praseodym• 12 years ago

Samsung, Qualcomm and TI all produce ARM chips and are all in the HSA foundation[1], so the wait is not on AMD.

http://www.hsafoundation.com

higherpurpose2• 12 years ago

Yeah, I didn't mean AMD's ARM cores, but when the other founding members of HSA are going to use it for ARM.

hornetblack• 12 years ago

Looks like K12 SOCs will have x86 and ARM cores. I'm guessing HSA will be involved.

jhartmann• 12 years ago

I am super excited about this driver. I worked on the early drm first at Precision Insight and then at VA Linux Systems, and having hardware validated command streams seperate for each process is just such a huge deal for performance. I wrote some proof of concept code awhile back that I posted to the Mesa dev list for doing something like this without hardware support, and based on my limited testing it would be a huge improvement in dma throughput. Its nice to see something like this happening finally, I think it is a path to getting a secure and highly performant driver. We have always had to make security tradeoffs with performance in Linux land, now we actually might have the infrastructure to get a chance at matching or beating Windows performance. Terribly exciting.

mey• 12 years ago

I glad to hear that, for a long time I've always considered Windows HAL (certainly XP/2000 and beyond) to be something the Linux kernel needed to really tackle the desktop.

listic• 12 years ago

1. From the security point of view, does HSA driver present a significant additional attack surface? I imagine some new kinds of tricks could become possible, like they did with Hyper-Threading http://www.daemonology.net/hyperthreading-considered-harmful...

2. Is HSA driver a roadblock for virtualization of the OS?

oakwhiz• 12 years ago

I wonder how safe it will be to perform cryptography through HSA.

j_s• 12 years ago

What is HSA? (from the link)

Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) driver for radeon-family GPUs.

HSA allows different processor types (CPUs, DSPs, GPUs, etc..) to share system resources more effectively via HW features including shared pageable memory, userspace-accessible work queues, and platform-level atomics. In addition to the memory protection mechanisms in GPUVM and IOMMUv2, the Sea Islands family of GPUs also performs HW-level validation of commands passed in through the queues (aka rings).

dragontamer2• 12 years ago

The exciting part of HSA though is the APU architecture that AMD is putting out. Its hardware specific, but the CPU and embedded GPU have a coherent cache. (CPU and GPU are on the same die with APUs).

sliverstorm• 12 years ago

Agreed, that's the most thrilling development to HSA in my eyes. Coherent memory structures (with much of it shared) all the way down truly elevates the GPU to first-class citizenship.

justin66• 12 years ago

Has AMD HSA development been purely a Windows (and game console?) affair up until this point?

edit: now I see that they've had a github up with Linux HSA drivers for a while now. Is the significance of today's thing that the patches are making it into the mainline kernel?

AMD HSA kernel driver

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