Re: [RFC PATCH 0/8] Qualcomm Cloud AI 100 driver

Jeffrey Hugo
2020-05-19T18:07:10Z

On 5/19/2020 11:41 AM, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
> On Tue, May 19, 2020 at 08:57:38AM -0600, Jeffrey Hugo wrote:
>> On 5/18/2020 11:08 PM, Dave Airlie wrote:
>>> On Fri, 15 May 2020 at 00:12, Jeffrey Hugo <jhugo@codeaurora.org> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Introduction:
>>>> Qualcomm Cloud AI 100 is a PCIe adapter card which contains a dedicated
>>>> SoC ASIC for the purpose of efficently running Deep Learning inference
>>>> workloads in a data center environment.
>>>>
>>>> The offical press release can be found at -
>>>> https://www.qualcomm.com/news/releases/2019/04/09/qualcomm-brings-power-efficient-artificial-intelligence-inference
>>>>
>>>> The offical product website is -
>>>> https://www.qualcomm.com/products/datacenter-artificial-intelligence
>>>>
>>>> At the time of the offical press release, numerious technology news sites
>>>> also covered the product. Doing a search of your favorite site is likely
>>>> to find their coverage of it.
>>>>
>>>> It is our goal to have the kernel driver for the product fully upstream.
>>>> The purpose of this RFC is to start that process. We are still doing
>>>> development (see below), and thus not quite looking to gain acceptance quite
>>>> yet, but now that we have a working driver we beleive we are at the stage
>>>> where meaningful conversation with the community can occur.
>>>
>>>
>>> Hi Jeffery,
>>>
>>> Just wondering what the userspace/testing plans for this driver.
>>>
>>> This introduces a new user facing API for a device without pointers to
>>> users or tests for that API.
>>
>> We have daily internal testing, although I don't expect you to take my word
>> for that.
>>
>> I would like to get one of these devices into the hands of Linaro, so that
>> it can be put into KernelCI. Similar to other Qualcomm products. I'm trying
>> to convince the powers that be to make this happen.
>>
>> Regarding what the community could do on its own, everything but the Linux
>> driver is considered proprietary - that includes the on device firmware and
>> the entire userspace stack. This is a decision above my pay grade.
>
> Ok, that's a decision you are going to have to push upward on, as we
> really can't take this without a working, open, userspace.

Fair enough. I hope that your position may have made things easier for me.

I hope this doesn't widen the rift as it were, but what is the "bar" for
this userspace?

Is a simple test application that adds two numbers on the hardware
acceptable?

What is the bar "working"? I intend to satisfy this request in good
faith, but I wonder, if no one has the hardware besides our customers,
and possibly KernelCI, can you really say that I've provided a working
userspace?

> Especially given the copyright owner of this code, that would be just
> crazy and foolish to not have open userspace code as well. Firmware
> would also be wonderful as well, go poke your lawyers about derivative
> work issues and the like for fun conversations :)

Those are the kind of conversations I try to avoid :)

> So without that changed, I'm not going to take this, and push to object
> that anyone else take this.
>
> I'm not going to be able to review any of this code anymore until that
> changes, sorry.
>
> thanks,
>
> greg k-h
>

--
Jeffrey Hugo