On Tue, Jul 06, 2021 at 12:36:51PM +0200, Daniel Vetter wrote:
If that means AI companies don't want to open our their hw specs enough to allow that, so be it - all you get in that case is offloading the kernel side of the stack for convenience, with zero long term prospects to ever make this into a cross vendor subsystem stack that does something useful.
I don't think this is true at all - nouveau is probably the best example.
nouveau reverse engineered a userspace stack for one of these devices.
How much further ahead would they have been by now if they had a vendor supported, fully featured, open kernel driver to build the userspace upon?
open up your hw enough for that, I really don't see the point in merging such a driver, it'll be an unmaintainable stack by anyone else who's not having access to those NDA covered specs and patents and everything.
My perspective from RDMA is that the drivers are black boxes. I can hack around the interface layers but there is a lot of wild stuff in there that can't be understood without access to the HW documentation.
I think only HW that has open specs, like say NVMe, can really be properly community oriented. Otherwise we have to work in a community partnership with the vendor.
Jason