Re: [PATCH 00/15] Habana Labs kernel driver

From: Dave Airlie
Date: Wed Jan 23 2019 - 17:02:19 EST


Adding Daniel as well.

Dave.

On Thu, 24 Jan 2019 at 07:57, Dave Airlie <airlied@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Wed, 23 Jan 2019 at 10:01, Oded Gabbay <oded.gabbay@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > Hello,
> >
> > For those who don't know me, my name is Oded Gabbay (Kernel Maintainer
> > for AMD's amdkfd driver, worked at RedHat's Desktop group) and I work at
> > Habana Labs since its inception two and a half years ago.
>
> Hey Oded,
>
> So this creates a driver with a userspace facing API via ioctls.
> Although this isn't a "GPU" driver we have a rule in the graphics
> drivers are for accelerators that we don't merge userspace API with an
> appropriate userspace user.
>
> https://dri.freedesktop.org/docs/drm/gpu/drm-uapi.html#open-source-userspace-requirements
>
> I see nothing in these accelerator drivers that make me think we
> should be treating them different.
>
> Having large closed userspaces that we have no insight into means we
> get suboptimal locked for ever uAPIs. If someone in the future creates
> an open source userspace, we will end up in a place where they get
> suboptimal behaviour because they are locked into a uAPI that we can't
> change.
>
> Dave.