Rust wgpu now has a
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@mcc Genuinely, something I hope we get someday is an FPGA-implemented open source GPU. I've wanted that for a long time, because I think graphics APIs are broadly a mistake, and instruction sets are better, and the reason we're in The Bad Place about this is vendors being protectionists about IP. But lately, I'm seeing additional benefits to making GPU simple and open enough that there's no excuse to slopping it.
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@poetaster @MaddieM4 i am at a point in my life i will go to enormous lengths to not write opengl. i think if we decided to create an entire new universe from scratch and the two things we brought along with us were C and OpenGL that would be such a sad outcome
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@MaddieM4@raphus.social @mcc@mastodon.social I’m waiting on my ULX3S board to ship and this is the main reason I ordered it, to become the video card of a microcontroller-based personal computer theoretically
@djsundog @mcc @MaddieM4 https://radiona.org/ulx3s/ that's a nice piece of kit!
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@poetaster @MaddieM4 i am at a point in my life i will go to enormous lengths to not write opengl. i think if we decided to create an entire new universe from scratch and the two things we brought along with us were C and OpenGL that would be such a sad outcome
@poetaster @MaddieM4 "joy was too big so instead we carried misery"
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@mcc Genuinely, something I hope we get someday is an FPGA-implemented open source GPU. I've wanted that for a long time, because I think graphics APIs are broadly a mistake, and instruction sets are better, and the reason we're in The Bad Place about this is vendors being protectionists about IP. But lately, I'm seeing additional benefits to making GPU simple and open enough that there's no excuse to slopping it.
@MaddieM4 @mcc sadly i suspect for most casual people (not nerds like us, like the average person you'd see elsewhere and to be very clear i am VERY supportive of this goal of a proper open sourced GPU) unless it's at feature parity with NVIDIA (which i hear those kinds of drivers and underlying firmware/ISAs are nightmares to develop and maintain) i doubt much outside nerd-sphere would care enough to even gain significance
that + the fact that i also hear it's apparently ruinously expensive to develop GPUs (like everything about them i hear is only getting more expensive by the day, especially on the performance side) that a serious one would likely have serious maintainability issues i fear
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@poetaster @MaddieM4 "joy was too big so instead we carried misery"
@mcc @poetaster Agreed about OpenGL. As for C... well, I always feel about complaints about C the way I did complaints about Biden during his presidency. Sure I got complaints of my own, but I can't always tell off the top if someone else complaining is doing so because they want a better version of the thing, or they're fundamentally opposed to the goals of the thing, and if it's the latter, we probably won't see eye to eye about it.
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@MaddieM4 @mcc sadly i suspect for most casual people (not nerds like us, like the average person you'd see elsewhere and to be very clear i am VERY supportive of this goal of a proper open sourced GPU) unless it's at feature parity with NVIDIA (which i hear those kinds of drivers and underlying firmware/ISAs are nightmares to develop and maintain) i doubt much outside nerd-sphere would care enough to even gain significance
that + the fact that i also hear it's apparently ruinously expensive to develop GPUs (like everything about them i hear is only getting more expensive by the day, especially on the performance side) that a serious one would likely have serious maintainability issues i fear
@amarioguy @MaddieM4 Should reaching every person on earth be the goal? If we make "reach everyone on earth" the goal are we being egalitarian or just massively overestimating our own abilities? I think my goal is something like "make something I can use, make something a large enough community wants to use the community is self sustaining, make something anyone on earth with $1000 *could* use if they decided they really wanted to" in that order
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@poetaster @MaddieM4 i am at a point in my life i will go to enormous lengths to not write opengl. i think if we decided to create an entire new universe from scratch and the two things we brought along with us were C and OpenGL that would be such a sad outcome
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@poetaster @MaddieM4 I continued writing OpenGL in C *from* the 1990s all the way up until last year and I would like to stop now.
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@sabrina Yes, exactly. This is exactly the question I am posing. But here is the hard part:
Imagine identifying the operations you need for a fast 2D desktop. Can you implement those operations in FPGA? Trivially. This would be a fun, fast project. *The software you want to run would not be written to use those operations*. Modern software is doing its 2D by sitting atop OpenGL or Vulkan. So the difficult part is *identifying parts of Vulkan and OpenGL* that in practice a 2D program uses.
@mcc @sabrina does "fast 2D desktop" include something like video playback at modern screen resolutions, or is a desktop stack from, say, the late 90s acceptable? I've been putting a little time here and there into rewriting Window Maker, and it seems to work perfectly well with only a few calls to the X server, which could do everything in software and probably work fine. But modern Web browsers and media players ask for a lot.
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@MaddieM4 @mcc sadly i suspect for most casual people (not nerds like us, like the average person you'd see elsewhere and to be very clear i am VERY supportive of this goal of a proper open sourced GPU) unless it's at feature parity with NVIDIA (which i hear those kinds of drivers and underlying firmware/ISAs are nightmares to develop and maintain) i doubt much outside nerd-sphere would care enough to even gain significance
that + the fact that i also hear it's apparently ruinously expensive to develop GPUs (like everything about them i hear is only getting more expensive by the day, especially on the performance side) that a serious one would likely have serious maintainability issues i fear
@amarioguy @mcc I mean I feel about modern GPUs and their intentionally prohibitive feature span the way I do about web standards: "that's a nice miracle you destroyed the ecosystem with. Undoing the damage is probably a multi-decade job and none of the normal folk will understand why feature reductions are needed. Won't stop me from patiently pushing in the right direction, though."
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@mcc my fantasy is something a bit like the mega65, or other retro fpga things (mister), in the reform next shell, and with quickly swappable cores that can share files, so you can try many different old/new/homebrew computers/os on the same set of (your) data. i think linux is mostly not really fun on simple hardware, so i agree with your desire of adopting sth like redox. personally i'd try to do sth as simple as possible but with memory protection (the one thing 90s OSes weren't great at)
it is not possible within the confines of the activitypub protocol to represent how much I love this post
this is a good post and I like this post a lot
CC: @mcc@mastodon.social
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@amarioguy @mcc I mean I feel about modern GPUs and their intentionally prohibitive feature span the way I do about web standards: "that's a nice miracle you destroyed the ecosystem with. Undoing the damage is probably a multi-decade job and none of the normal folk will understand why feature reductions are needed. Won't stop me from patiently pushing in the right direction, though."
@MaddieM4 @amarioguy a mental tool i keep using is
"this standard is too large" +
"if i make my own standard, no one will use it"
=>
"can i find a subset of the too-large standard which is tractable to implement, so i can target the subset, and at least the things i create will be usable by users of the 'large' standard" -
@poetaster @MaddieM4 "joy was too big so instead we carried misery"
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@mcc @sabrina does "fast 2D desktop" include something like video playback at modern screen resolutions, or is a desktop stack from, say, the late 90s acceptable? I've been putting a little time here and there into rewriting Window Maker, and it seems to work perfectly well with only a few calls to the X server, which could do everything in software and probably work fine. But modern Web browsers and media players ask for a lot.
@trurl @sabrina If a goal is to make the task small enough you can complete it, accelerated video may be one of the first things that has to go.
However also people *want* accelerated video. So if you build everything *else*, maybe someone pops up to contribute that piece.
(Also: One question I'd ask is whether dedicated video acceleration ASICs still exist. As recently as ~2010 it was not expected your video acceleration and your rendering acceleration would be the same piece of silicon.)
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As recently as like, a year ago, I believed that we couldn't trust hardware companies. I thought the biggest concern was that we'd get locked into a situation where at least for handheld devices like phones, if you want to buy one you get locked into a duopoly where you have to use one of two corp operating systems and you have to accept all kinds of DRM and identity tracking and such. I wanted a solution. So I was very interested in RISCV and I was trying to imagine the GPU version of RISCV.
@mcc On a tangent..
Wasn't RISC-V itself conceived as the kind of processor that can be so simple that you could smoosh 128 of them together as an array of GPU shaders?
So a complete system would have RISC-V units of different complexities and scale depending on their role.
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@trurl @sabrina If a goal is to make the task small enough you can complete it, accelerated video may be one of the first things that has to go.
However also people *want* accelerated video. So if you build everything *else*, maybe someone pops up to contribute that piece.
(Also: One question I'd ask is whether dedicated video acceleration ASICs still exist. As recently as ~2010 it was not expected your video acceleration and your rendering acceleration would be the same piece of silicon.)
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@trurl @sabrina If a goal is to make the task small enough you can complete it, accelerated video may be one of the first things that has to go.
However also people *want* accelerated video. So if you build everything *else*, maybe someone pops up to contribute that piece.
(Also: One question I'd ask is whether dedicated video acceleration ASICs still exist. As recently as ~2010 it was not expected your video acceleration and your rendering acceleration would be the same piece of silicon.)
@mcc @sabrina I am 100% sympathetic to the line of thinking you've shared here, and it's inspiring. (Redox has come a long way since I last looked. I should try it out.)
I'm asking about what I consider the basics need because hardware acceleration of some stripe may actually be necessary these days, given screen resolutions and expectations about tearing. I haven't peered that deeply into the stack lately, and things in X that seem like simple blitting may actually do more these days.
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@amarioguy @mcc I mean I feel about modern GPUs and their intentionally prohibitive feature span the way I do about web standards: "that's a nice miracle you destroyed the ecosystem with. Undoing the damage is probably a multi-decade job and none of the normal folk will understand why feature reductions are needed. Won't stop me from patiently pushing in the right direction, though."
@MaddieM4 @mcc honestly, very fair point, was definitely something i was considering as well, and i personally would be VERY happy with a fully properly no slop open sourced GPU even if it had a limited audience and/or limited scope, GPU land has felt so prohibitively closed for so long that i'd definitely be chomping at the bits to try it out
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@MaddieM4 @mcc honestly, very fair point, was definitely something i was considering as well, and i personally would be VERY happy with a fully properly no slop open sourced GPU even if it had a limited audience and/or limited scope, GPU land has felt so prohibitively closed for so long that i'd definitely be chomping at the bits to try it out
@amarioguy @MaddieM4 i am far from the only person to think about this. someone will do it eventually. the question is when we hit one that has riscv levels of Go Juice.
