Dave Airlie Linux Graphics blog

 At LPC 2022 we had a BoF session for GPUs with two topics. Moving to userspace consoles: Currently most mainline distros still use the kernel console, provided by the VT subsystem. We'd like to move to CONFIG_VT=n as the console and vt subsystem have historically been a source of bugs but are also nasty places for locking etc. It also can be the cause of oops going missing when it takes out the panic path with locking bugs stopping other paths from completely processing the oops (like pstore or serial).  The session started discussing what things would like. Lennart gave a great summary of the work David did a few years ago and the train of thought involved. Once you think through all the paths and things you want supported, you realise the best user console is going to be one that supports emojis and non-Latin scripts. This probably means you want a lightweight wayland compositor running a fullscreen VTE based terminal. Working back from the consequences of this means you probabl

 At Linux Plumbers Conference 2022, we held a BoF session around accelerators. This is a summary made from memory and notes taken by John Hubbard. We started with defining categories of accelerator devices. 1. single shot data processors, submit one off jobs to a device. (simpler image processors) 2. single-user, single task offload devices (ML training devices) 3. multi-app devices (GPU, ML/inference execution engines) One of the main points made is that common device frameworks are normally about targeting a common userspace (e.g. mesa for GPUs). Since a common userspace doesn't exist for accelerators, this presents a problem of what sort of common things can be targetted. Discussion about tensorflow, pytorch as being the userspace, but also camera image processing and OpenCL. OpenXLA was also named as a userspace API that might be of interest to use as a target for implementations.  There was a discussion on what to call the subsystem and where to place it in the tree. It was ag