[Nottingham] Writing Linux Kernel Functions In CUDA With KGPU

[Rory Holland]

I know Martin will be interested in this, and maybe some general interest too?

"Until today, GPGPU computing was a userspace privilege because of
NVIDIA's closed-source policy and AMD's semi-open state. KGPU is a
workaround to enable Linux kernel functionality written in CUDA.
Instead of figuring out GPU specs via reverse-engineering, it simply
uses a userspace helper to do CUDA-related work for kernelspace
requesters. A demo in its current source repository is a modified
eCryptfs, which is an encrypted filesystem used by Ubuntu and other
distributions. With the accelerated performance of a GPU AES cipher in
the Linux kernel, eCryptfs can get a 3x uncached read speedup and near
4x write speedup on an Intel X25-M 80G SSD. However, both the GPU
cipher-based eCryptfs and the CPU cipher-based one are changed to use
ECB cipher mode for parallelism. A CTR, counter mode, cipher may be
much more secure, although the real vanilla eCryptfs uses CBC mode.
Anyway, GPU vendors should think about opening their drivers and
computing libraries, or at least providing a mechanism to make it easy
to do GPU computing inside an OS kernel, given the fact that GPUs are
so widely deployed and the potential future of heterogeneous operating
systems."

Read more at Slashdot
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/05/06/1940220/Writing-Linux-Kernel-Functions-In-CUDA-With-KGPU