Accelerator drivers going forward (was Re: Habanalabs Open-Source TPC LLVM compiler and SynapseAI Core library)

Simon Ser contact at emersion.fr
Sun Sep 12 16:37:43 UTC 2021


> > > - move drivers/misc/habanalabs under drivers/gpu/habanalabs and
> > > review/discussions on dri-devel
>
> Wait, why move into gpu?  Are we going to do that for all hardware
> accelerators that we currently have in the kernel tree?
>
> These things are not GPUs in the sense of them being "do some work and
> write out to a screen", which is what I would associate with a GPU (G
> does stand for "Graphical", right?)
>
> Yes, GPUs can do things that some accelerators can do, but they can do
> things that accelerators can not do, and the other way around as well.
> I doubt you want all of the existing gpu drivers to be only treated as
> an "accelerator driver" now, as where would the logic that has to happen
> to get the bits out to a screen live?

This seems like a description of the "display" part of the drivers, driven
by KMS. There are many chips which can't do the "display" part, only the
"render" part. Their drivers are living in drivers/gpu/ as well.


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