Skip to content

Commit

Permalink
[libc][Docs] Add some motivation for the GPU libc
Browse files Browse the repository at this point in the history
This provides some basic motivation behind the GPU libc. Suggests are welcome.

Reviewed By: jdoerfert

Differential Revision: https://reviews.llvm.org/D152028
  • Loading branch information
jhuber6 committed Jun 16, 2023
1 parent 7a70968 commit 70b1c39
Show file tree
Hide file tree
Showing 4 changed files with 54 additions and 2 deletions.
1 change: 1 addition & 0 deletions libc/docs/gpu/index.rst
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -16,3 +16,4 @@ learn more about this project.
support
testing
rpc
motivation
51 changes: 51 additions & 0 deletions libc/docs/gpu/motivation.rst
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
@@ -0,0 +1,51 @@
.. _libc_gpu_motivation:

==========================
Motivation and Limitations
==========================

.. contents:: Table of Contents
:depth: 4
:local:

Motivation
==========

This project aims to provide a large subset of the C standard library to users
of GPU accelerators. We deliberately choose to only implement a subset of the C
library as some features are not expressly useful or easily implemented on the
GPU. This will be discussed further in `Limitations <libc_gpu_limitations>`_.
The main motivation behind this project is to provide the well understood C
library as a firm base for GPU development.

The main idea behind this project is that programming GPUs can be as
straightforward as programming on CPUs. This project aims to validate the GPU as
a more general-purpose target. The implementations here will also enable more
complex implementations of other libraries on the GPU, such as ``libc++``.

Host services and C library features are currently provided sparsely by the
different GPU vendors. We wish to provide these functions more completely and
make their implementations available in a common format. This is useful for
targets like OpenMP offloading or SYCL which wish to unify the offloading
toolchain. We also aim to provide these functions in a format compatible with
offloading in ``Clang`` so that we can treat the C library for the GPU as a
standard static library.

A valuable use for providing C library features on the GPU is for testing. For
this reason we build `tests on the GPU <libc_gpu_testing>`_ that can run a unit
test as if it were being run on the CPU. This also helps users port applications
that traditionally were run on the CPU. With this support, we can expand test
coverage for the GPU backend to the existing LLVM C library tests.

.. _libc_gpu_limitations:

Limitations
===========

We only implement a subset of the standard C library. The GPU does not
currently support thread local variables in all cases, so variables like
``errno`` are not provided. Furthermore, the GPU under the OpenCL execution
model cannot safely provide a mutex interface. This means that features like
file buffering are not implemented on the GPU. We can also not easily provide
threading features on the GPU due to the execution model so these will be
ignored, as will features like ``locale`` or ``time``.
2 changes: 1 addition & 1 deletion libc/docs/gpu/support.rst
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -12,7 +12,7 @@ Supported Functions

The following functions and headers are supported at least partially on the
device. Some functions are implemented fully on the GPU, while others require a
`remote procedure call <libc_gpu_rpc>`.
`remote procedure call <libc_gpu_rpc>`_.

ctype.h
-------
Expand Down
2 changes: 1 addition & 1 deletion libc/docs/gpu/testing.rst
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -19,7 +19,7 @@ Testing Infrastructure

The testing support in LLVM's libc implementation for GPUs is designed to mimic
the standard unit tests as much as possible. We use the `remote procedure call
<libc_gpu_rpc>` support to provide the necessary utilities like printing from
<libc_gpu_rpc>`_ support to provide the necessary utilities like printing from
the GPU. Execution is performed by emitting a ``_start`` kernel from the GPU
that is then called by an external loader utility. This is an example of how
this can be done manually:
Expand Down

0 comments on commit 70b1c39

Please sign in to comment.