[RFCv4 PATCH 0/2] A General Accelerator Framework, WarpDrive

[Olof Johansson]

On Thu, Aug 8, 2019 at 11:20 AM Zhangfei Gao <zhangfei.gao at linaro.org> wrote:
>
> *WarpDrive* is a general accelerator framework for the user application to
> access the hardware without going through the kernel in data path.
>
> WarpDrive is the name for the whole framework. The component in kernel
> is called uacce, meaning "Unified/User-space-access-intended Accelerator
> Framework". It makes use of the capability of IOMMU to maintain a
> unified virtual address space between the hardware and the process.
>
> WarpDrive is intended to be used with Jean Philippe Brucker's SVA
> patchset[1], which enables IO side page fault and PASID support.
> We have keep verifying with Jean's sva/current [2]
> We also keep verifying with Eric's SMMUv3 Nested Stage patch [3]
>
> This series and related zip & qm driver as well as dummy driver for qemu test:
> https://github.com/Linaro/linux-kernel-warpdrive/tree/5.3-rc1-warpdrive-rc4
>
> The library and user application:
> https://github.com/Linaro/warpdrive/tree/wdprd-v1-current

Hi,

An overall comment: This isn't really an "accelerator framework" as
much as a library for drivers to implement shared device/userspace
memory regions where the hardware allows for it. In particular, it
doesn't handle device-specific resource arbitration and
(understandably) the other components needed for an actual driver.

As such, it probably doesn't belong in drivers/misc per se, since it
is more of a library to be used *by* drivers. It also doesn't fulfill
the requirement of in-kernel interfaces having user when added, i.e. a
real driver submitted that makes use of this library and implements
the corresponding control path.


-Olof