https://twitter.com/AMDDevCentral/status/694917557195825152

Budi Purnomo of AMD posted a message on the GPUopen.com site, about AMD’s GPUOpen initiative, including HSAIL GDB and a related AMD GPU Debug SDK for it. These both sound very interesting, thanks AMD!

Today as part of AMD’s GPUOpen initiative, we are happy to announce the release of HSAIL GDB version 1.0 (prebuilt binary and source code).  This is AMD’s first debugger product that is built based on the new GCN debugger core technology. HSAIL GDB marks our first step toward building a rich debugging ecosystem for HSA and HCC.  Using HSAIL GDB, you can debug the execution of host CPU code and GPU agent kernel code (at the HSAIL language level) in a single debug session. HSA applications, including HCC and HIP, are supported on AMD APU platforms.  To learn more about the capability of HSAIL GDB, I encourage you to read through the HSAIL GDB tutorial. In addition, we also released a new AMD GPU Debug SDK (pre-built binary and source code).  This AMD GPU Debug SDK enables tool vendors to build their own rich GPU debugging ecosystem for AMD platforms based on the same GCN debugger core technology introduced within HSAIL GDB. The hardware based implementation provided in the GCN debugger core technology is a vast improvement over the previous debugger implementation provided in the AMD CodeXL OpenCL™ debugger which relies on repeated kernel recompilation and replay.  Using the GCN debugger technology, we are able to stop all the massively parallel threads in the GPU at a breakpoint, inspect the machine state by reading registers and memory, and then resume and execute all the GPU threads.  The instruction pointer at the ISA level can be correlated with the HSAIL line.  This project is the result of much hard work from the hardware and software teams within AMD over the past several years requiring much innovation in the hardware, firmware, kernel mode driver, user mode driver, runtime, compiler and the tools domain. […]

Full announcement:
http://gpuopen.com/hsail-gdb-hsail-level-debugger-with-amd-gcn-debug-technology/?sf20229050=1

https://github.com/HSAFoundation/HSA-Debugger-AMD/

 

I know nothing about firmware for GPUs, a lot to learn on this topic… 😦