Re: [MAINTAINER SUMMIT] User-space requirements for accelerator drivers

James Bottomley
2021-09-12T16:43:41Z

On Sun, 2021-09-12 at 18:55 +0300, Laurent Pinchart wrote:
> As mentioned in another part of the mail thread, requiring code being
> merged in upstream userspace projects and/or packaged by
> distributions will cause deadlocks, but requiring code to be
> submitted and (pre-)approved is workable. That's what DRM/KMS does.
> To upstream a new KMS property for instance, you need to show how
> it's going to be used in Weston/Xorg/Android/... by submitting
> patches, and have the overall architecture approved by the
> corresponding maintainers.

This is no different from interlocks required in pretty much every
other project crossing open source feature, so it seems like the right
approach to me. We already use this for confidential computing, which
often requires interlocking changes to QEMU, edk2 and other tools.
Usually, for confidential computing, the evaluation is on either the
QEMU or edk2 list which then accepts the patch and the rest of the
projects follow. We do, occasionally, get a late objection to the API
from one of the other projects after part of the enabling code has gone
upstream in the others, but we handle this like a bug fix.

James