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

Steven Rostedt
2021-09-11T14:20:10Z

On Sat, 11 Sep 2021 03:20:50 +0300
Laurent Pinchart <laurent.pinchart@ideasonboard.com> wrote:

> > Freely accessible documentation is really the key.
>
> In principle I'd agree, but that assumes such documentation would exist
> in the first place, with a sufficient level of quality. In many cases an
> open implementation the exercises all device features is a better form
> of documentation than what vendors have, even internally. Of course, the
> opposite is true as well, having seen too much vendor code for my own
> good, there is such a thing as a working for unreadable implementation.
>
> I fully agree with your point about feature completeness by the way,
> vendors will always find ways to hide pieces of the API if they really
> want to, but I think that would be true of documentation as well.

I would like not only documentation, but also an open source test suite
that simply tests the interface. Honestly, I believe that all new
interfaces to the kernel (open or not) should have full documentation
and a test suite interface before it gets accepted. We have
tools/selftests that should be updated with all new interfaces into the
kernel.

Even if it's just a smoke test, that would be fine. Obviously if
there's a driver without hardware, it can't be tested. But if you have
that hardware, perhaps there could be a simple test suite of the
interface to let you know it is still functional.

-- Steve