On Fri, May 14, 2021 at 10:34 AM Greg Kroah-Hartman
[off-list ref] wrote:

On Thu, May 13, 2021 at 01:00:26PM +0200, Maciej Kwapulinski wrote:

quoted

Dear kernel maintainers,

This submission is a kernel driver to support Intel(R) Gaussian & Neural
Accelerator (Intel(R) GNA). Intel(R) GNA is a PCI-based neural co-processor
available on multiple Intel platforms. AI developers and users can offload
continuous inference workloads to an Intel(R) GNA device in order to free
processor resources and save power. Noise reduction and speech recognition
are the examples of the workloads Intel(R) GNA deals with while its usage
is not limited to the two.

How does this compare with the "nnpi" driver being proposed here:
        https://lore.kernel.org/r/20210513085725.45528-1-guy.zadicario@intel.com (local)

Please work with those developers to share code and userspace api and
tools.  Having the community review two totally different apis and
drivers for the same type of functionality from the same company is
totally wasteful of our time and energy.

Agreed, but I think we should go further than this and work towards a
subsystem across companies for machine learning and neural networks
accelerators for both inferencing and training.

We have support for Intel habanalabs hardware in drivers/misc, and there are
countless hardware solutions out of tree that would hopefully go the same
way with an upstream submission and open source user space, including

- Intel/Mobileye EyeQ
- Intel/Movidius Keembay
- Nvidia NVDLA
- Gyrfalcon Lightspeeur
- Apple Neural Engine
- Google TPU
- Arm Ethos

plus many more that are somewhat less likely to gain fully open source
driver stacks.

       Arnd