Re: [RFC PATCH v2 1/3] drivers/accel: define kconfig and register a new major

From: Oded Gabbay <ogabbay@kernel.org>
To: Jason Gunthorpe <jgg@nvidia.com>
Cc: dri-devel@lists.freedesktop.org,
	Maciej Kwapulinski <maciej.kwapulinski@linux.intel.com>,
	Kevin Hilman <khilman@baylibre.com>,
	Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>,
	Jagan Teki <jagan@amarulasolutions.com>,
	John Hubbard <jhubbard@nvidia.com>,
	stanislaw.gruszka@intel.com,
	Jeffrey Hugo <quic_jhugo@quicinc.com>,
	Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>, Jiho Chu <jiho.chu@samsung.com>,
	Jacek Lawrynowicz <jacek.lawrynowicz@linux.intel.com>,
	Yuji Ishikawa <yuji2.ishikawa@toshiba.co.jp>,
	Tvrtko Ursulin <tvrtko.ursulin@linux.intel.com>,
	Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>,
	linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
	Thomas Zimmermann <tzimmermann@suse.de>,
	Alex Deucher <alexander.deucher@amd.com>
Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH v2 1/3] drivers/accel: define kconfig and register a new major
Date: Mon, 7 Nov 2022 16:02:01 +0200	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <CAFCwf10A=-bj2nR8WasNxyQQ07D24Je04tzKxqv2X_XnA0BUSQ@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <Y2kDzPswkKyZyRpS@nvidia.com>

On Mon, Nov 7, 2022 at 3:10 PM Jason Gunthorpe <jgg@nvidia.com> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Nov 07, 2022 at 03:01:08PM +0200, Oded Gabbay wrote:
> > I don't agree with your statement that it should be "a layer over top of DRM".
> > Anything on top of DRM is a device driver.
> > Accel is not a device driver, it is a new type of drm minor / drm driver.
>
> Yeah, I still think this is not the right way, you are getting almost
> nothing from DRM and making everything more complicated in the
> process.
>
> > The only alternative imo to that is to abandon the idea of reusing
> > drm, and just make an independant accel core code.
>
> Not quite really, layer it properly and librarize parts of DRM into
> things accel can re-use so they are not intimately tied to the DRM
> struct device notion.
>
> IMHO this is much better, because accel has very little need of DRM to
> manage a struct device/cdev in the first place.
>
> Jason
I'm not following. How can an accel device be a new type of drm_minor,
if it doesn't have access to all its functions and members ?
How will accel device leverage, for example, the GEM code without
being a drm_minor ?

Librarizing parts of DRM sounds nice in theory but the reality is that
everything there is interconnected, all the structures are
interdependent.
I would have to re-write the entire DRM library to make such a thing
work. I don't think this was the intention.

The current design makes the accel device an integral part of drm,
with very minimal code duplication and without re-writing DRM.

Oded