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

Leon Romanovsky
2021-09-11T10:31:06Z

On Sat, Sep 11, 2021 at 01:55:16AM +0200, Thomas Gleixner wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 10 2021 at 16:45, Josh Triplett wrote:
>
> > On Sat, Sep 11, 2021 at 12:52:14AM +0200, Mauro Carvalho Chehab wrote:
> >> On media, enforcing userspace to always be open source would
> >> have been very bad, as it would prevent several videoconferencing
> >> software to exist on Linux.
> >
> > I don't think we should enforce that all userspace users of an interface
> > be Open Source. I do think we should enforce that *some* userspace user
> > of an interface be Open Source before we add the interface.
>
> The real question is whether the interface is documented in a way that
> an Open Source implementation is possible. It does not matter whether it
> exists at that point in time or not. Even if it exists there is no
> guarantee that it is feature complete.
>
> Freely accessible documentation is really the key.

I have more radical view than you and think that documentation is far
from being enough. I would like to see any userspace API used (or to be
used) in any package which exists in Debiam/Fedora/SuSE.

Only this will give us some sort of confidence that API and device are usable
to some level. As a side note, we will be able to estimate possible API
deprecation/fix/extension based on simple search in package databases.

IMHO, github projects to show API usage are the worst possible way to
allow acceptance for new userspace API.

Thanks

>
> Thanks,
>
> tglx
>
>
>