Cuda 2.1 Support

[BSDMare]

I've been running the 180.22 drivers for almost a week now, seem to be working great. No slow down or memory leaks so far. So time to start breaking things! The Release Highlights (http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=125933) say that this driver has Cuda 2.1 support, which I believe is the first time us BSD'ers have had any Cuda support?

How do we go about messing with this? There seems to be a toolkit and SDK (http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_get.html) that needs to be downloaded for other platforms, but I can't find a FreeBSD one. Is this coming soon or do we have to try and fudge the Linux?

[zander]

Unfortunately, it looks like this was a cut & paste error, CUDA is not currently supported on FreeBSD.

[rnejdl]

So the follow up question then... is CUDA support coming to FreeBSD any time soon? I think this would be a very good field with the solid background FreeBSD has as a server platform.

Rusty

[rsamuel]

zander,

I find this very dissapointing, as other FreeBSD users will, especially since the FreeBSD Display Driver – x86 page http://www.nvidia.com/object/freebsd_180.22.html still says that CUDA 2.1 support has been added, and FreeBSD CUDA support has been mirrored in many third-party announcements.

When I saw the line "Added support for CUDA 2.1.", NVIDIA jumped an order of magnitude on my cred-o-meter, but has since fallen two orders of magnitude now that I realise it was a mistake that is still yet to be rectified. I had planned to make use of this new capability by adding CUDA throughput to CFD analyses I have been conducting on FreeBSD. On a per-processor-clock basis, FreeBSD runs these analyses faster than any Linux flavour, so I won't be abandoning FreeBSD any time soon. But I will have to abandon CUDA for some other solution.

My question to NVIDIA is: Can any niche product with limited mass-market appeal afford to be turning potential customers away ?

[zander]

@rsamuel: the CUDA 2.1 release highlight was included in the FreeBSD graphics driver release notes by mistake. I corrected this mistake in the announcement on nV News, but was unaware that the same cut & paste error had been made on nvidia.com; I asked that the download page be updated, as well.

I understand your disappointment and apologize for the misunderstanding.

@rnejdl: I'm not aware of plans to add CUDA support for FreeBSD in the near future. It may be possible to make the Linux runtime work within the Linuxulator, but I don't believe this has been attempted. Please note that due to kernel limitations, FreeBSD/i386 NVIDIA graphics driver support is not on par with the Linux/Solaris platforms - lacking features like SLI and support for large memory configurations - and that reliable FreeBSD/amd64 support is not currently possible.