Re: [RFC PATCH 0/8] Qualcomm Cloud AI 100 driver

[Jeffrey Hugo]

On 5/19/2020 11:41 AM, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
> On Tue, May 19, 2020 at 08:57:38AM -0600, Jeffrey Hugo wrote:
> > On 5/18/2020 11:08 PM, Dave Airlie wrote:
> > > On Fri, 15 May 2020 at 00:12, Jeffrey Hugo <jhugo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > > > Introduction:
> > > > Qualcomm Cloud AI 100 is a PCIe adapter card which contains a dedicated
> > > > SoC ASIC for the purpose of efficently running Deep Learning inference
> > > > workloads in a data center environment.
> > > >
> > > > The offical press release can be found at -
> > > > https://www.qualcomm.com/news/releases/2019/04/09/qualcomm-brings-power-efficient-artificial-intelligence-inference
> > > >
> > > > The offical product website is -
> > > > https://www.qualcomm.com/products/datacenter-artificial-intelligence
> > > >
> > > > At the time of the offical press release, numerious technology news sites
> > > > also covered the product.  Doing a search of your favorite site is likely
> > > > to find their coverage of it.
> > > >
> > > > It is our goal to have the kernel driver for the product fully upstream.
> > > > The purpose of this RFC is to start that process.  We are still doing
> > > > development (see below), and thus not quite looking to gain acceptance quite
> > > > yet, but now that we have a working driver we beleive we are at the stage
> > > > where meaningful conversation with the community can occur.
> > >
> > >
> > > Hi Jeffery,
> > >
> > > Just wondering what the userspace/testing plans for this driver.
> > >
> > > This introduces a new user facing API for a device without pointers to
> > > users or tests for that API.
> >
> > We have daily internal testing, although I don't expect you to take my word
> > for that.
> >
> > I would like to get one of these devices into the hands of Linaro, so that
> > it can be put into KernelCI.  Similar to other Qualcomm products. I'm trying
> > to convince the powers that be to make this happen.
> >
> > Regarding what the community could do on its own, everything but the Linux
> > driver is considered proprietary - that includes the on device firmware and
> > the entire userspace stack.  This is a decision above my pay grade.
>
> Ok, that's a decision you are going to have to push upward on, as we
> really can't take this without a working, open, userspace.

Fair enough.  I hope that your position may have made things easier for me.

I hope this doesn't widen the rift as it were, but what is the "bar" for 
this userspace?

Is a simple test application that adds two numbers on the hardware 
acceptable?

What is the bar "working"?  I intend to satisfy this request in good 
faith, but I wonder, if no one has the hardware besides our customers, 
and possibly KernelCI, can you really say that I've provided a working 
userspace?

> Especially given the copyright owner of this code, that would be just
> crazy and foolish to not have open userspace code as well.  Firmware
> would also be wonderful as well, go poke your lawyers about derivative
> work issues and the like for fun conversations :)

Those are the kind of conversations I try to avoid  :)

> So without that changed, I'm not going to take this, and push to object
> that anyone else take this.
>
> I'm not going to be able to review any of this code anymore until that
> changes, sorry.
>
> thanks,
>
> greg k-h


--
Jeffrey Hugo
Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. is a member of the
Code Aurora Forum, a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project.