Re: [git pull] habanalabs pull request for kernel 5.15

From: Jeffrey Hugo
Date: Tue Aug 24 2021 - 21:17:05 EST


On 8/19/2021 12:48 PM, Dave Airlie wrote:
On Fri, 20 Aug 2021 at 03:07, Greg KH <gregkh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Thu, Aug 19, 2021 at 02:02:09PM +0300, Oded Gabbay wrote:
Hi Greg,

This is habanalabs pull request for the merge window of kernel 5.15.
The commits divide roughly 50/50 between adding new features, such
as peer-to-peer support with DMA-BUF or signaling from within a graph,
and fixing various bugs, small improvements, etc.

Pulled and pushed out, thanks!

NAK for adding dma-buf or p2p support to this driver in the upstream
kernel. There needs to be a hard line between
"I-can't-believe-its-not-a-drm-driver" drivers which bypass our
userspace requirements, and I consider this the line.

This driver was merged into misc on the grounds it wasn't really a
drm/gpu driver and so didn't have to accept our userspace rules.

Adding dma-buf/p2p support to this driver is showing it really fits
the gpu driver model and should be under the drivers/gpu rules since
what are most GPUs except accelerators.

Care to elaborate? I'm not trying to be cute, but all I see here is that dma-buf/p2p using drivers must be in drivers/gpu, yet many drivers outside of the gpu area use those features. Surely your position can't be that only drivers/gpu can use dma-buf or p2p (which is part of the PCIe spec).

We are opening a major can of worms (some would say merging habanalabs
driver opened it), but this places us in the situation that if a GPU
vendor just claims their hw is a "vector" accelerator they can use
Greg to bypass all the work that been done to ensure we have
maintainability long term. I don't want drivers in the tree using
dma-buf to interact with other drivers when we don't have access to a
userspace project to validate the kernel driver assumptions.

Umm, isn't that [1]? The Habana device has the most open userspace I'm aware of. Seems disingenuous to claim you don't have access to a userspace project for this driver.

[1] - https://github.com/HabanaAI/hl-thunk