A few months ago I shared on our sister blog, "Linux Addicts", the news about AMD's decision to stop financing the development of ZLUDA, this because at the time AMD mentioned that it was not of its commercial interest and this allowed the developer open its developments as agreed in the contract.
ZLUDA was initially developed for Intel GPUs. However, in 2022, the project's developer left Intel and signed a contract with AMD to develop a CUDA-compatible layer for its GPUs.
After that at the beginning of this year 2024 AMD determined that it was not strategic for its business allow running CUDA applications on their GPUs (possibly for fear of legal issues with NVIDIA). Under the terms of his contract, this allowed Andrzej (known for his work creating implementations of CUDA technology for Intel and AMD GPUs) to make his developments public, and during email exchanges, an AMD representative also granted him permission. to publish these advances.
This sparked great interest in the community, since ZLUDA promised to offer binary compatibility with CUDA applications already compiled with the CUDA compiler for NVIDIA GPUs, without the need to modify the source code. This ability would allow developers and users to run applications designed for NVIDIA on AMD and Intel hardware no complications. As such, ZLUDA enables the execution of CUDA applications without modifications on systems with AMD GPUs, using the ROCm stack and the HIP runtime.
But now that has changed, since recently AMD asked Andrzej Janik to remove part of the code from the public domain of the project. This notification comes six months after the code was made public, AMD lawyers contacted Andrzej, informing him that the permission granted during the correspondence had no legal validity.
Due to a confidentiality agreement, details of communications with lawyers cannot be disclosed from AMD. As a result of this situation, Andrzej was forced to remove from the public domain all the code he had developed while working for AMD.
About the case Andrzej Janik has mentioned that he has no intention of abandoning the project ZLUDA and plans to rebuild it using the code it had developed before beginning its collaboration with AMD (this code was originally designed to work with Intel GPUs).
The code that was previously here has been removed at the request of AMD.
The code was released with AMD's approval via email. AMD's legal department now says it is not legally binding, hence the revocation.
Before anyone asks: I have not received legal threats or any communications from NVIDIA.So now what?
At this point, one more hostile corporation doesn't make much difference. I plan to rebuild ZLUDA from the pre-AMD codebase. Funding for the project is coming in and I hope to be able to share details in the coming weeks. It will have a different scope and certain features will not return.
I wanted it to be a surprise, but one of those features was support for NVIDIA GameWorks. I got it working in Batman: Arkham Knight, but I never finished it and now that code will never see the light of day:
In addition, he mentions that in the coming weeks, More details will be offered about the future of the project. However, it has already been announced that some functionalities will be lost and certain projects that were in parallel development will not be made public.
An example of this is the work that had been done to support NVIDIA GameWorks technology, which sought to implement GameWorks-based effects in the game "Batman: Arkham Knight."
Interestingly, NVIDIA, owner of CUDA technology, has not issued any requests related to the ZLUDA project, so it is possible that AMD has thought things through and plans to use the development for some project or has in mind to continue the development where it left off.