Re: Have GPGPU support in guix?

[Thompson, David]

On Thu, Apr 26, 2018 at 11:31 PM, Chris Marusich <address@hidden> wrote:
> Jonathan Brielmaier <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> On 26/04/2018 10:04, Mark H Weaver wrote:
>>> What about firmware?  Do we know which AMD Radeon cards, if any, can be
>>> used without including nonfree software in the OS?
>>
>> I'm not aware of an AMD/ATI Radeon card which doesn't need nonfree
>> firmware. The in-tree firmware in kernel goes back until ATI Radeon
>> R100[0], out-tree (linux-firmware.git) are all cards who run the amdgpu,
>> radeon or r600 kernel driver. So no card without nonfree firmware in the
>> last ~20 years...
>>
>> There could be some Nvidia cards who doesn't need nonfree firmware
>> according to [1]. It have to be before Geforce 8000[2].
>>
>> AFAIK Intel integrated GPUs didn't need nonfree firmware.
>>
>> [0]
>> https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git/tree/firmware/radeon?h=v4.4.129
>> [1]
>> https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/393504/which-amd-ati-cards-dont-require-non-free-firmware-when-using-radeon
>> [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_8_series
>
> Are there any new graphics cards being made today by anybody, which do
> not require non-free firmware?  I don't know much about the state of
> graphics cards in the GNU/Linux world, but I'm very curious about it.

I'm not aware of a single new GPU that fits the bill. Last year I
bought the most recent NVIDIA GPU I could find that works blob-free
with nouveau drivers, the GTX 770. That will last me awhile but I
don't know what I will do when it becomes too weak to handle modern
software. Furthermore, I don't know what to do when my Thinkpad X220
and it's aging Intel GPU are no longer good enough, since all new
Intel GPUs also require firmware blobs. The future looks bleak.

- Dave