linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH v3 00/14] Driver of Intel(R) Gaussian & Neural Accelerator

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Date:   Fri, 14 May 2021 11:00:38 +0200
From:   Arnd Bergmann <arnd@...db.de>
To:     Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@...uxfoundation.org>
Cc:     Maciej Kwapulinski <maciej.kwapulinski@...ux.intel.com>,
        Jonathan Corbet <corbet@....net>,
        Derek Kiernan <derek.kiernan@...inx.com>,
        Dragan Cvetic <dragan.cvetic@...inx.com>,
        Andy Shevchenko <andy.shevchenko@...il.com>,
        Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
        "open list:DOCUMENTATION" <linux-doc@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH v3 00/14] Driver of Intel(R) Gaussian & Neural Accelerator

On Fri, May 14, 2021 at 10:34 AM Greg Kroah-Hartman
<gregkh@...uxfoundation.org> wrote:
> On Thu, May 13, 2021 at 01:00:26PM +0200, Maciej Kwapulinski wrote:
> > Dear kernel maintainers,
> >
> > This submission is a kernel driver to support Intel(R) Gaussian & Neural
> > Accelerator (Intel(R) GNA). Intel(R) GNA is a PCI-based neural co-processor
> > available on multiple Intel platforms. AI developers and users can offload
> > continuous inference workloads to an Intel(R) GNA device in order to free
> > processor resources and save power. Noise reduction and speech recognition
> > are the examples of the workloads Intel(R) GNA deals with while its usage
> > is not limited to the two.
>
> How does this compare with the "nnpi" driver being proposed here:
>         https://lore.kernel.org/r/20210513085725.45528-1-guy.zadicario@intel.com
>
> Please work with those developers to share code and userspace api and
> tools.  Having the community review two totally different apis and
> drivers for the same type of functionality from the same company is
> totally wasteful of our time and energy.

Agreed, but I think we should go further than this and work towards a
subsystem across companies for machine learning and neural networks
accelerators for both inferencing and training.

We have support for Intel habanalabs hardware in drivers/misc, and there are
countless hardware solutions out of tree that would hopefully go the same
way with an upstream submission and open source user space, including

- Intel/Mobileye EyeQ
- Intel/Movidius Keembay
- Nvidia NVDLA
- Gyrfalcon Lightspeeur
- Apple Neural Engine
- Google TPU
- Arm Ethos

plus many more that are somewhat less likely to gain fully open source
driver stacks.

       Arnd