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

[Dave Airlie]

On Sun, 12 Sept 2021 at 23:55, Greg Kroah-Hartman
<gregkh at linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Sep 10, 2021 at 06:10:27PM +0200, Daniel Vetter wrote:
> > Forgot to add dri-devel.
> >
> > On Fri, Sep 10, 2021 at 6:09 PM Daniel Vetter <daniel.vetter at ffwll.ch> wrote:
> > >
> > > On Fri, Sep 10, 2021 at 9:58 AM Greg Kroah-Hartman
> > > <gregkh at linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
> > > > On Fri, Sep 10, 2021 at 10:26:56AM +0300, Oded Gabbay wrote:
> > > > > Hi Greg,
> > > > >
> > > > > Following our conversations a couple of months ago, I'm happy to tell you that
> > > > > Habanalabs has open-sourced its TPC (Tensor Processing Core) LLVM compiler,
> > > > > which is a fork of the LLVM open-source project.
> > > > >
> > > > > The project can be found on Habanalabs GitHub website at:
> > > > > https://github.com/HabanaAI/tpc_llvm
> > > > >
> > > > > There is a companion guide on how to write TPC kernels at:
> > > > > https://docs.habana.ai/en/latest/TPC_User_Guide/TPC_User_Guide.html
> > > >
> > > > That's great news, thanks for pushing for this and releasing it all!
> > >
> > > Yeah this is neat.
> > >
> > > There's still the problem that we spent the past 2.5 years pissing off
> > > a lot of people for an imo questionable political project, bypassing
> > > all the technical review and expertise. Now that the political
> > > nonsense is resolved I think we need to look at at least the technical
> > > cleanup. The angered people are much harder to fix, so let's maybe
> > > ignore that (or perhaps a ks topic, no idea, I'm honestly not super
> > > motivated to rehash this entire story again). Here's what I think we
> > > should do:
> > >
> > > - 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?
>

We could just mv drivers/gpu drivers/accel if that helps your mental model here.

> 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?)

Neither are a lot of the gpu drivers, it's almost like we evolved the
subsystem in 20 years,
and the name got away from us.

As an example:
etnaviv, panfrost, lima and vgem drivers have no display interfaces at
all. Nada, they do nothing except accelerate and use dma-buf to talk
to other drivers.


> 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?

Don't care, totally doesn't matter if a driver is accelerator +
display, you could write in-driver buses if you wanted to abstract
this more, since internally most GPUs are just SoCs, the display and
accelerator pieces talk to power management, irqs and dma-buf like
functionality internally in the driver, the thing is for most GPUs
there is a single PCI device to bind to, so historically nobody has
seen the value in splitting them more or adding an in-driver bus for
one set of devices.

> And since we have a long history of accepting accelerator drivers (I see
> some in our tree since 2018 at the least), and there is no common
> userspace collation trying to make a common userspace api, why do they
> have to live in the same place?  What makes them common except for the
> fact that they use the kernel as a semi-dumb pipe to send work to and
> from a different processor?
>
> Look at drivers/misc/cxl/ and drivers/misc/ocxl and drivers/misc/uacce/
> and drivers/misc/sgi-gru and drivers/misc/bcm-vk/ even drivers/misc/mei/
> as that is an off-load engine we talk to, right?
>
> What about the drivers/fpga/ api we have, it handles accelerators as
> well.  I'm sure we have many other examples in the kernel tree as well,
> I just did a quick look and found these.
>
> All the above accelerators do things in different ways because their
> hardware is different, so they need different user/kernel apis, right?
> How are we going to unify them?  Who is going to unify them?
>
> So drivers/accel/ perhaps?  I would be able to get rid of loads of
> drivers/misc/ code that way :)
>
> Who is going to be the new maintainer of this subsystem?

We already said if we could get agreement on having things follow the
rules, then they can be merged under drm trees or we'd start a new
accel tree.

The problem is the free-for-all merge with no barriers approach that
you and I believe Olof are campaigning for, doesn't seem to create
communities, it may create consulting or training opportunities for
the Linux Foundation, but thus far I don't see any communities.

Graphics accelerator community exists because of and has itself
refined the rules over time. I don't think our rules will necessarily
work for other groups immediately but I think other groups need to
construct acceptable merge criteria beyond the kernel, and kernel
maintainers have to take more responsibility for saying no if they
don't have time for community building.


> So far they have all been going into drivers/misc/ because no one else
> stepped up to do the review of them except me.  I would _LOVE_ the help
> here as I end up reviewing a new one every kernel release at the least,
> but companies do not seem to be willing to fund developers to be
> maintainers these days :(
>
> And yes, I have been reviewing the fpga code as well, even though they
> do have a good maintainer, as those patches flow through my tree due to
> historical reasons.  I know the fpga developers would have loved some
> help with review of those patches.

Lack of reviewing isn't the problem here, lack of responsibility for
creating a long term mess is. You are creating long term dumping
grounds for badly thought out stuff. Saying people keeping adding more
trash to my dump and it's overloading me is just the effect of having
created the dump with no rules to follow in the first place.

>
> > > - review the dma-buf stuff on dri-devel and then land it through
> > > standard flows, not the gregk-misc bypass
>
> Are dma-bufs somehow required to be reviewed on dri-devel?  As others
> have asked in the past, they are already being used in other subsystems
> (like IB) today, did those authors also get review there?

Yes any use of dma-buf has to be cc'ed to dri-devel and linux-media
per MAINTAINERS

>
> If so, great, if not, that feels odd to me, as I am seeing lots of
> out-of-tree drivers start to use these structures, which is why the api
> was created (to stop the roll-your-own-implementations.)  Does dri-devel
> want me to have those vendors cc: you all when those get submitted?

Yes. MAINTAINERS has matching for this, are you not advising people to
use the proper submission techniques and thus bypassing that file?

The reason is dma-buf and later by extension dma-fence can create
really bad problems for the kernel around memory management.

https://dri.freedesktop.org/docs/drm/driver-api/dma-buf.html#indefinite-dma-fences

When a driver is self contained and doesn't interact with other kernel
drivers nobody really has to care. However once a driver starts
interacting with other drivers in the kernel, a responsible maintainer
has to check that these new drivers aren't going to crap all over the
existing drivers and destabilise the kernel. Someone has to review the
hardware design to see if page faulting works or if preemption works
or a bunch of other gotchas. Someone has to review the userspace to
make sure it isn't doing knowingly bad things or making assumptions
based on the kernel driver doing bad things.

The thing is we've had code merged into our in-tree i915 driver that
broke a bunch of these assumptions, and have had to spend a year
cleaning it out, now this happened post-merge and diligence had
lessened, having the expertise to spot this in new dma-buf/fence users
is why we insist on having access to way more than just the 1000 line
kernel driver submission.


> I will be glad to not accept any more, but as I say above, what are the
> new requirements going to be so that those companies that do want to
> submit their code know what to do?

I'm proposing a patch for documentation that maintainers can sign up
for (it's mentioned in the ksummit thread).

> And what exactly are we using as a definition of an accelerator?  We
> have networking cards that are "accelerators" as well as crypto
> "accelerators" :)
>
> > > I expect we'll have a proper discussion what the stack should look
> > > like with the next submission (from a different vendor maybe), that
> > > ship kinda sailed with habanalabs.
>
> Who is going to define this stack?  As there is no industry standard,
> why would we define this?

Because someone has to help, saying yes isn't helping, it's enabling
back behaviour. Parenting and maintaining both involve saying No for
the future prosperity of the ecosystem.

Dave.