On Mon, May 17, 2021 at 3:12 PM Thomas Zimmermann <tzimmermann@xxxxxxx>wrote:
offload
Hi
Am 17.05.21 um 09:40 schrieb Daniel Vetter:
On Fri, May 14, 2021 at 11:00:38AM +0200, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
On Fri, May 14, 2021 at 10:34 AM Greg Kroah-Hartman
<gregkh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Thu, May 13, 2021 at 01:00:26PM +0200, Maciej Kwapulinski wrote:
Dear kernel maintainers,
This submission is a kernel driver to support Intel(R) Gaussian & Neural
Accelerator (Intel(R) GNA). Intel(R) GNA is a PCI-based neural co-processor
available on multiple Intel platforms. AI developers and users can
freecontinuous inference workloads to an Intel(R) GNA device in order to
processor resources and save power. Noise reduction and speech recognition
are the examples of the workloads Intel(R) GNA deals with while its usage
is not limited to the two.
How does this compare with the "nnpi" driver being proposed here:
https://lore.kernel.org/r/20210513085725.45528-1-guy.zadicario@xxxxxxxxx
Please work with those developers to share code and userspace api and
tools. Having the community review two totally different apis and
drivers for the same type of functionality from the same company is
totally wasteful of our time and energy.
Agreed, but I think we should go further than this and work towards a
subsystem across companies for machine learning and neural networks
accelerators for both inferencing and training.
We have, it's called drivers/gpu. Feel free to rename to drivers/xpu or
think G as in General, not Graphisc.
I hope this was a joke.
Just some thoughts:
AFAICT AI first came as an application of GPUs, but has now
evolved/specialized into something of its own. I can imagine sharing
some code among the various subsystems, say GEM/TTM internals for memory
management. Besides that there's probably little that can be shared in
the userspace interfaces. A GPU is device that puts an image onto the
screen and an AI accelerator isn't. Treating both as the same, even if
they share similar chip architectures, seems like a stretch. They might
evolve in different directions and fit less and less under the same
umbrella.
The putting something on the screen is just a tiny part of what GPUs
do these days. Many GPUs don't even have display hardware anymore.
Even with drawing APIs, it's just some operation that you do with
memory. The display may be another device entirely. GPUs also do
video encode and decode, jpeg acceleration, etc. drivers/gpu seems
like a logical place to me. Call it drivers/accelerators if you like.
Other than modesetting most of the shared infrastructure in
drivers/gpu is around memory management and synchronization which are
all the hard parts. Better to try and share that than to reinvent
that in some other subsystem.
Alex
And as Dave mentioned, these devices are hard to obtain. We don't really
know what we sign up for.
Just my 2 cents.
Best regards
Thomas
--
Thomas Zimmermann
Graphics Driver Developer
SUSE Software Solutions Germany GmbH
Maxfeldstr. 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany
(HRB 36809, AG Nürnberg)
Geschäftsführer: Felix Imendörffer
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