Imagination Technologies Limited

Mario Sopena Novales

Philip Morris

Jamie Broome

John William Howson

Dave Roberts

Ian King

Damien McNamara

Wei Shao

Dilip Bansal

Mihai Dragan

David Roberts

Damien Mcnamara

Phil Morris

A method of performing safety-critical rendering at a graphics processing unit within a graphics processing system, the method comprising: receiving, at the graphics processing system, graphical data for safety-critical rendering at the graphics processing unit; scheduling at a safety controller, in accordance with a reset frequency, a plurality of resets of the graphics processing unit; rendering the graphical data at the graphics processing unit; and the safety controller causing the plurality of resets of the graphics processing unit to be performed commensurate with the reset frequency.

Periodic reset of graphics processor unit in safety-critical graphics processing system

A graphics processing system includes a plurality of processing units, wherein the graphics processing system is configured to process a task first and second times at the plurality of processing units. Data identifying which processing unit of the plurality of processing units the task has been allocated to is consulted on allocating the task to a processing unit for processing for a second time, and, in response, the task is allocated for processing for the second time to any processing unit of the plurality of processing units other than the processing unit to which the task was allocated for processing for a first time.

Workload repetition redundancy

A method of GPU virtualization comprises allocating each virtual machine (or operating system running on a VM) an identifier by the hypervisor and then this identifier is used to tag every transaction deriving from a GPU workload operating within a given VM context (i.e. every GPU transaction on the system bus which interconnects the CPU, GPU and other peripherals). Additionally, dedicated portions of a memory resource (which may be GPU registers or RAM) are provided for each VM and whilst each VM can only see their allocated portion of the memory, a microprocessor within the GPU can see all of the memory. Access control is achieved using root memory management units which are configured by the hypervisor and which map guest physical addresses to actual memory addresses based on the identifier associated with the transaction.

GPU virtualisation

A computer system has a plurality of operating systems, each operating system including a GPU driver; a graphics processing unit (GPU) including GPU firmware for controlling the execution of tasks at the graphics processing unit and, for each operating system: a firmware state register modifiable by the GPU firmware and indicating whether the GPU firmware is online; and an OS state register modifiable by the GPU driver of the respective operating system and indicating whether the GPU driver is online; and a memory management unit configured to mediate access to the registers of the GPU such that each operating system can access its respective registers but not those of other operating systems; wherein: one of the GPU drivers at the plurality of operating systems is a host GPU driver configured to initialise the GPU and bring the GPU firmware online; each GPU driver is configured to submit tasks for processing at the GPU only if its respective firmware state register indicates that the GPU firmware is online; and the GPU is configured to process tasks for an operating system if the respective OS state register of that operating system indicates that the GPU driver is online.

Hypervisor removal

A method of detecting an error at a graphics processing unit causes an instruction including a request for a response from a graphics processing unit to be provided to the graphics processing unit. A timer being configured to expire after a time period is initialised, and during the time period the graphics processing unit is monitored for the response from the graphics processing unit. An error is determined to have occurred in response to determining that no response was received from the graphics processing unit before the timer expired.

Detecting error in safety-critical GPU by monitoring for response to an instruction

A method of configuring a graphics processing unit includes generating configuration data that specifies a configuration to be adopted by the graphics processing unit. The configuration data is received at the graphics processing unit, which is configured in accordance with the configuration data by writing the configuration data into one or more registers of the graphics processing unit. It is determined whether the graphics processing unit is correctly configured in accordance with the configuration data by determining whether the configuration data has been correctly written into the one or more registers of the graphics processing unit. An error is determined to have occurred in response to determining that the graphics processing unit is not correctly configured in accordance with the configuration data.

Configuration check for safety-critical GPU

A graphics processing system includes a plurality of processing units for processing tasks, each processing unit being configured to process a task independently from any other processing unit of the plurality of processing units; a check unit operable to form a signature which is characteristic of an output of a processing unit on processing a task; and a fault detection unit operable to compare signatures formed at the check unit; wherein the graphics processing system is configured to process each task of a first type first and second times at the plurality of processing units so as to, respectively, generate first and second processed outputs, wherein the check unit is configured to form first and second signatures which are characteristic of, respectively, the first and second processed outputs, and wherein the fault detection unit is configured to compare the first and second signatures and raise a fault signal if the first and second signatures do not match.

A method of initialising rendering at a graphics processing unit configured to perform safety-critical rendering within a graphics processing system, the method comprising: generating configuration data for initialising rendering of safety critical graphical data at the graphics processing unit; receiving the configuration data for initialising rendering at the graphics processing unit; configuring the graphics processing unit in accordance with the configuration data for initialising rendering; determining whether the graphics processing unit is correctly configured in accordance with the configuration data; and determining, by a safety controller external to the graphics processing unit, that an initialisation error has occurred in response to determining that the graphics processing unit is not correctly configured in accordance with the configuration data.

Critical workload check

A method of initialising rendering at a graphics processing unit configured to perform safety-critical rendering, the method comprising: causing an instruction for initialising rendering of safety critical graphical data at the graphics processing unit to be provided to the graphics processing unit, said instruction comprising a request for response from the graphics processing unit; initialising a timer, said timer being configured to expire after a time period; and monitoring, during said time period, for a response from the graphics processing unit; determining, by a safety controller external to the graphics processing unit, that an initialisation error has occurred if no response is received from the graphics processing unit before the timer expires.

A method of GPU virtualization comprises allocating each virtual machine (or operating system running on a VM) an identifier by the hypervisor and then this identifier is used to tag every transaction deriving from a GPU workload operating within a given VM context (i.e. every GPU transaction on the system bus which interconnects the CPU, GPU and other peripherals). Additionally, dedicated portions of a memory resource (which may be GPU registers or RAM) are provided for each VM and while each VM can only see their allocated portion of the memory, a microprocessor within the GPU can see all of the memory. Access control is achieved using root memory management units which are configured by the hypervisor and which map guest physical addresses to actual memory addresses based on the identifier associated with the transaction.

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Hertfordshire, United Kingdom

Mario Sopena Novales