Re: [PATCH v3 00/14] Adding GAUDI NIC code to habanalabs driver

[Jason Gunthorpe]

On Tue, Sep 22, 2020 at 07:30:32PM +0300, Gal Pressman wrote:
> On 22/09/2020 19:14, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
> > On Tue, Sep 22, 2020 at 03:46:29PM +0300, Gal Pressman wrote:
> > 
> >> I agree, that makes sense.
> >> But assuming Oded actually goes and implements all the needed verbs to get a
> >> basic functional libibverbs provider (assuming their HW can do it somehow), is
> >> it really useful if no one is going to use it?
> >> It doesn't sound like habanalabs want people to use GAUDI as an RDMA adapter,
> >> and I'm assuming the only real world use case is going to be using the hl stack,
> >> which means we're left with a lot of dead code that's not used/tested by anyone.
> >>
> >> Genuine question, wouldn't it be better if they only implement what's actually
> >> going to be used and tested by their customers?
> > 
> > The general standard for this 'accel' hardware, both in DRM and RDMA
> > is to present an open source userspace. Companies are encouraged to
> > use that as their main interface but I suppose are free to carry the
> > cost of dual APIs, and the community's wrath if they want.
> 
> I didn't mean they should maintain two interfaces.
> The question is whether they should implement libibverbs support that covers the
> cases used by their stack, or should they implement all "mandatory" verbs so
> they could be able to run libibverbs' examples/perftest/pyverbs as well, even
> though these will likely be the only apps covering these verbs.

As I said, the minimum standard is an open source user space that will
operate the NIC. For EFA we decided that was ibv_ud_pingpong, and now
parts of pyverbs. A similar decision would be needed here too. It is a
conversation that should start with a propsal from Oded.

The *point* is to have the open userspace, so I really don't care what
their proprietary universe does, and shrinking the opensource side
becuase it is "redundant" is completely backwards to what we want to
see.

Jason