i wish people in our industry would stop (forever, completely, absolutely) using metaphors/allusions. it's a complete disservice to anyone that isn't in on the trick. it doesn't give you syscalls. that's impossible because there's no sys/os on a gpu and your actual os does not (necessarily) have any way to peer into the address space/schedular/etc of a gpu core.
what it gives you is something that's working really really hard to pretend be a syscall:
> Traditionally, the C library abstracts over several functions that interface with the platform’s operating system through system calls. The GPU however does not provide an operating system that can handle target dependent operations. Instead, we implemented remote procedure calls to interface with the host’s operating system while executing on a GPU.
i wish people in our industry would stop (forever, completely, absolutely) using metaphors/allusions. it's a complete disservice to anyone that isn't in on the trick. it doesn't give you syscalls. that's impossible because there's no sys/os on a gpu and your actual os does not (necessarily) have any way to peer into the address space/schedular/etc of a gpu core.
what it gives you is something that's working really really hard to pretend be a syscall:
> Traditionally, the C library abstracts over several functions that interface with the platform’s operating system through system calls. The GPU however does not provide an operating system that can handle target dependent operations. Instead, we implemented remote procedure calls to interface with the host’s operating system while executing on a GPU.
https://libc.llvm.org/gpu/rpc.html.