Developing Bare-Metal GPGPU Drivers From Scratch: What prevents scientists from developing own GPGPU drivers?

Abstract

Most of modern computers use Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) as an additional source of computing power. However, using GPUs in bare-metal research operating systems comes with some challenges. Existing drivers for Linux or Windows are complex and cannot be used for without much effort. Documentation of modern GPUs is often missing or incomplete and drivers are incomprehensive or closed source. This paper tries to explain what prevents scientists from creating their own GPU drivers. Additionally, it gives an overview about GPGPU driver development for GPUs from different manufactur- ers and shows some challenges. Nevertheless, we have ambitiously started an undertaking to develop our own driver from scratch. To some extend this was successful, but with many problems on the way.