I recently discovered GDev a FLOSS replacement for CUDA from circa 2012. From its white-paper it seems that it had good performance when compared to the proprietary driver. This is almost a drop in replacement including the ability to run PTX code. This could have been adapted to be a drop-in replacement like SCALE for NVIDIA GPU’s, but it seems to have gotten little to no support, the repo seems to recommend installing it from the git repo itself, so I dont know if it ever got onto a major package repo for any major distribution.
My question is: what happened? How did seemingly, this entire project (a nearly complete cuda implementation) seem to slip through the cracks? If we had this today we could have NVK + GDev = No Nvidia Proprietary Driver