Hi Am 17.05.21 um 21:23 schrieb Alex Deucher:
On Mon, May 17, 2021 at 3:12 PM Thomas Zimmermann <tzimmermann@xxxxxxx>
wrote:
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-processoravailable on multiple Intel platforms. AI developers and users can
offload
continuous inference workloads to an Intel(R) GNA device in order tofreeprocessor 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.
I'm not sure whether we're on the same page or not.I look at this from the UAPI perspective: the only interfaces that we really standardize among GPUs is modesetting, dumb buffers, GEM. The sophisticated rendering is done with per-driver interfaces. And modesetting is the thing that AI does not do.
Sharing common code among subsystems is not a problem. Many of our more-sophisticated helpers are located in DRM because no other subsystems have the requirements yet. Maybe AI now has and we can move the rsp shareable code to a common location. But AI is still no GPU. To give a bad analogy: GPUs transmit audio these days. Yet we don't treat them as sound cards.
Best regards Thomas
AlexAnd 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
-- 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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