Linux Kernel: GPU Blobs, 5.8, 5.9 and ARM32 in Action
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Netgpu and the hazards of proprietary kernel modules
On its face, the netgpu patch set appears to add a useful feature: the ability to copy network data directly between a network adapter and a GPU without moving it through the host CPU. This patch set has quickly become an example of how not to get work into the kernel, though; it has no chance of being merged in anything like its current form and has created a backlash designed to keep modules like it from ever working in mainline kernels. It all comes down to one fundamental mistake: basing kernel work on a proprietary kernel module.
The use case for netgpu appears to be machine-learning applications that consume large amounts of data. The processing of this data is offloaded to a GPU for performance reasons. That GPU must be fed a stream of data, though, that comes from elsewhere on the network; this data follows the usual path of first being read into main memory, then written out to the GPU. The extra copy hurts, as does the memory-bus traffic and the CPU time needed to manage this data movement.This overhead could be significantly reduced if the network adapter were to write the data directly into the GPU's memory, which is accessible via the PCI bus. A suitably capable network adapter could place packet data in GPU memory while writing packet headers to normal host memory; that allows the kernel's network stack to do the protocol processing as usual. The netgpu patch exists to support this mode of operation, seemingly yielding improved performance at the cost of losing some functionality; anything that requires looking at the packet payload is going to be hard to support if that data is routed directly to GPU memory.
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Some statistics from the 5.8 kernel cycle
Linus Torvalds released the 5.8 kernel on August 2, concluding another nine-week development cycle. By the time the work was done, 16,306 non-merge changesets had been pulled into the mainline repository for this release. That happens to be a record, beating the previous record holder (4.9, released in December 2016) by 92 changesets. It was, in other words, a busy development cycle. It's time for our traditional look into where that work came from to see what might be learned.
A total of 1,991 developers contributed to 5.8, which is another record; 304 of those developers appeared for the first time in this cycle. The community added over 924,000 lines of code and removed around 371,000 for a net growth of over 553,000 lines of code.
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FUSE Read/Write Passthrough Updated For Much Better File-System Performance
Of various criticisms around FUSE for implementing file-systems in user-space, one of the most prolific issues is around the performance generally being much lower than a proper file-system kernel driver. But with the FUSE passthrough functionality that continue to be worked on, there is the potential for much better FUSE file-system performance.
The ongoing FUSE passthrough work is about allowing the passthrough read/write of files in avoiding at times unnecessary overhead of the user-space FUSE daemon. When operating in FUSE_PASSTHROUGH mode, the daemon can allow on a per-file basis opening in passthrough mode where all read and write operations are forwarded by the kernel directly to the lower file-system rather than to the FUSE daemon running in user-space.
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Navi 2 Fixes, Other Graphics/Display Fixes Sent In For Linux 5.9
Following all of the feature updates to the open-source GPU/DRM drivers for Linux 5.9 that included a lot of new material, the first batch of fixes have now been sent in for mainline in addressing early fallout from these many changes.
Ahead of the Linux 5.9-rc1 release this weekend, an initial batch of Direct Rendering Manager fixes were sent out on Thursday.
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How the ARM32 Linux kernel decompresses
This is intended as a comprehensive rundown of how the Linux kernel self-decompresses on ARM 32-bit legacy systems. All machines under arch/arm/* uses this method if they are booted using a compressed kernel, and most of them are using compressed kernels.
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Walleij: How the ARM32 Linux kernel decompresses
For those who are into the details: here is a step-by-step guide through the process of decompressing an Arm kernel and getting ready to boot from Linus Walleij.
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