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[libc][Docs] Add some motivation for the GPU libc
This provides some basic motivation behind the GPU libc. Suggests are welcome. Reviewed By: jdoerfert Differential Revision: https://reviews.llvm.org/D152028
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support | ||
testing | ||
rpc | ||
motivation |
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.. _libc_gpu_motivation: | ||
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========================== | ||
Motivation and Limitations | ||
========================== | ||
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.. contents:: Table of Contents | ||
:depth: 4 | ||
:local: | ||
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Motivation | ||
========== | ||
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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. | ||
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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++``. | ||
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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. | ||
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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. | ||
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.. _libc_gpu_limitations: | ||
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Limitations | ||
=========== | ||
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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``. |
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