What if Nvidia provided good ⋆BSD drivers? According to the answers from Greg Lindahl and Eugene Miya on Quora to the question "Why is the OS landscape of Supercomputers dominated by Linux instead of BSD?" [1] the Linux dominance is largely an historical oddity rather than due to some inherent superiority of Linux.
If for some reason supercomputer builders could no longer use the best GPUs in supercomputers, would they stick with Linux or would they follow the hardware and switch to a ⋆BSD on the compute nodes?
>If for some reason supercomputer builders could no longer use the best GPUs in supercomputers, would they stick with Linux or would they follow the hardware and switch to a ⋆BSD on the compute nodes?
I have no idea what the answer would be, but my guess is it would hinge on 1) AMDs reaction, and the performance hit (if any) of switching to AMD GPUs on Linux and 2) the performance hit (if any) of switching the OS to *BSD
NVIDIA does produces drivers for FreeBSD[1]. I don't know if they're considered "good" or not, but they definitely aim to have the same features and quality as on Linux.
If for some reason supercomputer builders could no longer use the best GPUs in supercomputers, would they stick with Linux or would they follow the hardware and switch to a ⋆BSD on the compute nodes?
[1] http://qr.ae/RUortF