Not-a-GPU accelerator drivers cross the line
Not-a-GPU accelerator drivers cross the line
[Kernel] Posted Aug 26, 2021 16:23 UTC (Thu) by corbet
As a general rule, the kernel community is happy to merge working device drivers without much concern for the availability of any associated user-space code. What happens in user space is beyond the kernel's concern and unaffected by the kernel's license. There is an exception, though, in the form of drivers for graphical processors (GPUs), which cannot be merged in the absence of a working, freely-licensed user-space component. The question of which drivers are subject to that rule has come up a few times in recent years; that discussion has now come to a decision point with an effort to block some Habana Labs driver updates from entry into the 5.15 kernel.