linux-kernel - Re: New subsystem for acceleration devices

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Date:   Wed, 3 Aug 2022 23:20:51 +0300
From:   Oded Gabbay <oded.gabbay@...il.com>
To:     Dave Airlie <airlied@...il.com>,
        Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@...uxfoundation.org>
Cc:     Yuji Ishikawa <yuji2.ishikawa@...hiba.co.jp>,
        Jiho Chu <jiho.chu@...sung.com>, Arnd Bergmann <arnd@...db.de>,
        "Linux-Kernel@...r. Kernel. Org" <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: New subsystem for acceleration devices

On Wed, Aug 3, 2022 at 10:04 PM Dave Airlie <airlied@...il.com> wrote:
>
> On Sun, 31 Jul 2022 at 22:04, Oded Gabbay <oded.gabbay@...il.com> wrote:
> >
> > Hi,
> > Greg and I talked a couple of months ago about preparing a new accel
> > subsystem for compute/acceleration devices that are not GPUs and I
> > think your drivers that you are now trying to upstream fit it as well.
>
> We've had some submissions for not-GPUs to the drm subsystem recently.
>
> Intel GNA, Intel VPU, NVDLA, rpmsg AI processor unit.
>
> why is creating a new subsystem at this time necessary?
>
> Are we just creating a subsystem to avoid the open source userspace
> consumer rules? Or do we have some concrete reasoning behind it?
>
> Dave.

Hi Dave.
The reason it happened now is because I saw two drivers, which are
doing h/w acceleration for AI, trying to be accepted to the misc
subsystem.
Add to that the fact I talked with Greg a couple of months ago about
doing a subsystem for any compute accelerators, which he was positive
about, I thought it is a good opportunity to finally do it.

I also honestly think that I can contribute much to these drivers from
my experience with the habana driver (which is now deployed in mass at
AWS) and contribute code from the habana driver to a common framework
for AI drivers.

Regarding the open source userspace rules in drm - yes, I think your
rules are too limiting for the relatively young AI scene, and I saw at
the 2021 kernel summit that other people from the kernel community
think that as well.
But that's not the main reason, or even a reason at all for doing
this. After all, at least for habana, we open-sourced our compiler and
a runtime library. And Greg also asked those two drivers if they have
matching open-sourced user-space code.

And a final reason is that I thought this can also help in somewhat
reducing the workload on Greg. I saw in the last kernel summit there
was a concern about bringing more people to be kernel maintainers so I
thought this is a step in the right direction.

Oded