I dont have much knowledge about designing os but i saw in many sites that C language is used in developing os. I was wondering is it possible to use cuda C to develop a simple 32 bit OS. with less features say os exclusively to play audio files like chromium os for browsing.
not possible currently. come back in 10 years.
not possible currently. come back in 10 years.
Well, it would be POSSIBLE, but it would not use any of the GPU’s strengths, so it’d just be a funky hack.
At the very simplest, you could make a machine-level emulator of an x86 chip (or 6502 or Z80 or ARM) and run with just one GPU thread doing the emulation of a given instruction stream. (losing almost all the GPU’s parallelism, but hey, it’s just a hack…) Then you could run anything you like, even Windows 7, very very similar to Bochs.
Admittedly this would be useless, it would be painfully slow, but very cool just to see.
An interesting question is just what performance you’d see. Probably something like 1/300 native CPU speeds. I guess this because such emulators run at about 1/100 speed when run on the CPU, and the simple one-thread implementation GPU hack is roughly like a 1GHz processor. The GPU’s longer pipelines, and lack of speculation and prefetch would make it less efficient clock for clock than a CPU for this kind of 1 thread hack.
Is this the only way to make an OS run on the GPU? No, but it’s an interesting thing to brainstorm.
Well, it would be POSSIBLE, but it would not use any of the GPU’s strengths, so it’d just be a funky hack.
At the very simplest, you could make a machine-level emulator of an x86 chip (or 6502 or Z80 or ARM) and run with just one GPU thread doing the emulation of a given instruction stream. (losing almost all the GPU’s parallelism, but hey, it’s just a hack…) Then you could run anything you like, even Windows 7, very very similar to Bochs.
Admittedly this would be useless, it would be painfully slow, but very cool just to see.
An interesting question is just what performance you’d see. Probably something like 1/300 native CPU speeds. I guess this because such emulators run at about 1/100 speed when run on the CPU, and the simple one-thread implementation GPU hack is roughly like a 1GHz processor. The GPU’s longer pipelines, and lack of speculation and prefetch would make it less efficient clock for clock than a CPU for this kind of 1 thread hack.
Is this the only way to make an OS run on the GPU? No, but it’s an interesting thing to brainstorm.
Thorough and informative, thank you. i am not gonna attempt this experiment, i am actually looking for cuda projects for my college, could u please give me any advice.
Thorough and informative, thank you. i am not gonna attempt this experiment, i am actually looking for cuda projects for my college, could u please give me any advice.
Program a giant cellular automaton, such as Conway’s Game of Life. In theory these things are turing complete, so it should be possible to run any operating system with them ;-)
Program a giant cellular automaton, such as Conway’s Game of Life. In theory these things are turing complete, so it should be possible to run any operating system with them ;-)