Can you elaborate on what you mean? This is an open source library for developers to write code that can compile without changes on both CPU and GPU. This solves a problem that can’t be solved in firmware, and this is not a case of nvidia using cpu and host memory - whether to use cpu and host memory is strictly up to the developer.

> Keeping the software part in firmware lets customer free to use any kind of OS

Raspberry Pi initially shipped with such a graphics stack, with the Arm side just being a communication driver in the kernel and an RPC stack in user-space.

It isn't a good idea (for numerous reasons, including security) and is even more closed in practice than what ships today.

That sounds like vendor binary blob sdk libraries, only everything is an rpc and you're not even in the same memory space, aka distributed computing, except you have no control over the device stack. Sounds kinda awful to me.

> A lot of hardware has builtin software, either inside a firmware or as a driver.

Correct.

> Keeping the software part in firmware lets customer free to use any kind of OS.

Do you mean firmware, or firmware and driver?

You can't do everything in firmware.

> Using host cpu and memory is bad design IMHO.

How do you propose that you program the GPU then?

The CPU has to interact with the GPU. Some software has to manage that interaction.

That said, we are not talking about either a driver or firmware. This is a part of our toolchain. It is a library that you use when writing a heterogeneous program.