We are pleased to announce that the GPU/media/AI buffer management and interop Microconference has been accepted into the 2021 Linux Plumbers Conference. The Linux GPU subsystem has long had three major tenets:

• Kernel mediation, validation, submission, and scheduling of GPU jobs
• Implicit synchronisation between multiple user space accessors
• Open-source user space

Forthcoming hardware makes the former two difficult, if not impossible, to achieve. In order to give user space the fastest possible path to support modern complex workloads, forthcoming hardware is removing the notion of a small number of kernel-controlled job queues, replacing it with direct user space access to command queues to submit and control their own jobs.

This, and evolution in the Vulkan API, make it difficult to retain the existing implicit synchronization model, where the kernel tracks all access and ensures that the hardware executes jobs in the order of user space submission, so that multiple independent clients can reuse the same buffers without data hazards. As all of these changes impact both media and neural-network accelerators, this Linux Plumbers Conference microconference allows us to open the discussion past the graphics community and into the wider kernel community.

This year’s topics to be discussed include:

• Handling explicit synchronization without kernel mediation and awareness
• Supporting fence-value reads on multiple architectures in an efficient way
• User space API implications of buffer sharing without guaranteed job completion
• cgroup support and accounting for GPU memory allocation and time-sharing
  – API and long-term support implications for closed-source firmware

Come and join us in the discussion of keeping Linux a first class citizen
in the would of graphics and media.

We hope to see you there.