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 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 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.