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

From: Andrew Donnellan
Date: Wed Jan 23 2019 - 20:03:31 EST


On 24/1/19 8:52 am, Olof Johansson wrote:
But, I think the largest question I have (for a broader audience) is:

I predict that we will see a handful of these kind of devices over the
upcoming future -- definitely from ML accelerators but maybe also for
other kinds of processing, where there's a command-based, buffer-based
setup sending workloads to an offload engine and getting results back.
While the first waves will all look different due to design trade-offs
made in isolation, I think it makes sense to group them in one bucket
instead of merging them through drivers/misc, if nothing else to
encourage more cross-collaboration over time. First steps in figuring
out long-term suitable frameworks is to get a survey of a few
non-shared implementations.

So, I'd like to propose a drivers/accel drivers subtree, and I'd be
happy to bootstrap it with a small group (@Dave Airlie: I think your
input from GPU land be very useful, want to join in?). Individual
drivers maintained by existing maintainers, of course.

I think it might make sense to move the CAPI/OpenCAPI drivers over as
well -- not necessarily to change those drivers, but to group them
with the rest as more show up.

For cxl/ocxl, I have no objection to moving to this new subtree if that's what we all agree to do. (what do people do about UAPI headers in this situation? keep them where they are in misc/?)

If we do go ahead and set up this new subtree, perhaps we can use the mailing list I set up at linux-accelerators@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx but we haven't really started using...

--
Andrew Donnellan OzLabs, ADL Canberra
andrew.donnellan@xxxxxxxxxxx IBM Australia Limited