>Disregarding that use case, it shows that GPUs can actually do things like fprintf or open sockets.
Can you elaborate on this? My mental model of GPU is basically like a huge vector coprocessor. How would things like printf or sockets work directly from the GPU when they require syscalls to trap into the OS kernel? Given that the kernel code is running on the CPU, that seems to imply that there needs to be a handover at some point. Or conversely even if there was unified memory and the GPU could directly address memory-mapped peripherals, you'd basically need to reimplement drivers wouldn't you?
Can you elaborate on this? My mental model of GPU is basically like a huge vector coprocessor. How would things like printf or sockets work directly from the GPU when they require syscalls to trap into the OS kernel? Given that the kernel code is running on the CPU, that seems to imply that there needs to be a handover at some point. Or conversely even if there was unified memory and the GPU could directly address memory-mapped peripherals, you'd basically need to reimplement drivers wouldn't you?