GPU support in MSIM

• Thesis title in Czech: GPU support v MSIM
• Thesis title in English: GPU support in MSIM
• Key words: MSIM|GPU|hardware emulation
• Academic year of topic announcement: 2022/2023
• Thesis type: Bachelor's thesis
• Thesis language: angličtina
• Department: Department of Distributed and Dependable Systems (32-KDSS)
• Supervisor: Mgr. Vojtěch Horký, Ph.D.
• Author: Petr Tlapa - assigned and confirmed by the Study Dept.
• Date of registration: 13.07.2023
• Date of assignment: 20.07.2023
• Confirmed by Study dept. on: 31.07.2023

Guidelines

At the moment, MSIM supports only simple textual console as an output device. The implementation will add support for a new type of device simulating raster graphical screen. The new device(s) are expected to support different modes emulating trivial and more sophisticated GPUs.

The most trivial one would contain a fixed sized screen with fixed memory addresses while advanced ones would offer features leaning towards hardware acceleration.

The extension will follow current concepts of MSIM where focus is on ease of debugging and reproducibility at the expense of performance. Protocol simplification is thus fine as long as it mimics the real behavior well enough. As a proof of concept, the author will also provide a simple bootstrap code that can drive the provided device.

The text of the thesis will focus on the analysis of the required and optional features of such device and on achieving reasonable support allowing possible use in the Operating systems course.

Tentative list of reviewers: Petr Tůma, Martin Kruliš, Jakub Yaghob

References

Hardware Level VGA and SVGA Video Programming Information Page, available on-line at http://www.osdever.net/FreeVGA/vga/vga.htm

OpenGL documentation, available on-line at https://www.opengl.org/

Vulkan documentation, available on-line at https://www.vulkan.org/

MSIM documentation, available on-line at https://d3s.mff.cuni.cz/software/msim/