[RFC PATCH 0/3] new subsystem for compute accelerator devices
John Hubbard
jhubbard at nvidia.com
Tue Oct 25 02:21:52 UTC 2022
On 10/24/22 05:43, Oded Gabbay wrote:
Hi Oded,
The patches make sense to me. I'm still just reading through and looking
for minor issues, but at a high level it seems to match what the LPC
discussions pointed to.
>> What's your opinion on the long-term prospect of DRM vs accel? I assume
>> that over time, DRM helpers will move into accel and some DRM drivers
>> will start depending on accel?
> I don't think that is what I had in mind.
> What I had in mind is that accel helpers are only relevant for accel
> drivers, and any code that might also be relevant for DRM drivers will
> be placed in DRM core code. e.g. GEM enhancements, RAS netlink
Yes. That is how I understood it ("it" being both the LPC discussions,
and this patchset) as well:
* accel-only code goes in drivers/accel, thus allowing for
smaller, simpler drivers (as compared to full drm) for that case.
* graphics and display code still goes in drivers/gpu/drm, because
it is much too hard to rename or move that directory.
* code common to both also goes in drivers/gpu/drm.
Looking ahead a bit more:
For full-featured GPUs that do both Graphics and Compute, I expect
that a *lot* of the code will end up in drivers/gpu/drm. Because so
much of setting up for Compute is also really just setting up for
Graphics--that's how it evolved, after all!
And as things are structured now, it looks like those full featured
GPU stacks will also need an aux bus (which I only just now learned
about, but it looks quite helpful here). And also, user space will
need to open both /dev/dri/* and /dev/accel/* nodes, if it needs
access to anything live objects that drivers/accel owns.
thanks,
--
John Hubbard
NVIDIA
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