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+.. SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0
+
+============
+Introduction
+============
+
+The Linux compute accelerators subsystem is designed to expose compute
+accelerators in a common way to user-space and provide a common set of
+functionality.
+
+These devices can be either stand-alone ASICs or IP blocks inside an SoC/GPU.
+Although these devices are typically designed to accelerate
+Machine-Learning (ML) and/or Deep-Learning (DL) computations, the accel layer
+is not limited to handling these types of accelerators.
+
+Typically, a compute accelerator will belong to one of the following
+categories:
+
+- Edge AI - doing inference at an edge device. It can be an embedded ASIC/FPGA,
+ or an IP inside a SoC (e.g. laptop web camera). These devices
+ are typically configured using registers and can work with or without DMA.
+
+- Inference data-center - single/multi user devices in a large server. This
+ type of device can be stand-alone or an IP inside a SoC or a GPU. It will
+ have on-board DRAM (to hold the DL topology), DMA engines and
+ command submission queues (either kernel or user-space queues).
+ It might also have an MMU to manage multiple users and might also enable
+ virtualization (SR-IOV) to support multiple VMs on the same device. In
+ addition, these devices will usually have some tools, such as profiler and
+ debugger.
+
+- Training data-center - Similar to Inference data-center cards, but typically
+ have more computational power and memory b/w (e.g. HBM) and will likely have
+ a method of scaling-up/out, i.e. connecting to other training cards inside
+ the server or in other servers, respectively.
+
+All these devices typically have different runtime user-space software stacks,
+that are tailored-made to their h/w. In addition, they will also probably
+include a compiler to generate programs to their custom-made computational
+engines. Typically, the common layer in user-space will be the DL frameworks,
+such as PyTorch and TensorFlow.
+
+Sharing code with DRM
+=====================
+
+Because this type of devices can be an IP inside GPUs or have similar
+characteristics as those of GPUs, the accel subsystem will use the
+DRM subsystem's code and functionality. i.e. the accel core code will
+be part of the DRM subsystem and an accel device will be a new type of DRM
+device.
+
+This will allow us to leverage the extensive DRM code-base and
+collaborate with DRM developers that have experience with this type of
+devices. In addition, new features that will be added for the accelerator
+drivers can be of use to GPU drivers as well.
+
+Differentiation from GPUs
+=========================
+
+Because we want to prevent the extensive user-space graphic software stack
+from trying to use an accelerator as a GPU, the compute accelerators will be
+differentiated from GPUs by using a new major number and new device char files.
+
+Furthermore, the drivers will be located in a separate place in the kernel
+tree - drivers/accel/.
+
+The accelerator devices will be exposed to the user space with the dedicated
+261 major number and will have the following convention:
+
+- device char files - /dev/accel/accel*
+- sysfs - /sys/class/accel/accel*/
+- debugfs - /sys/kernel/debug/accel/accel*/
+
+Getting Started
+===============
+
+First, read the DRM documentation at Documentation/gpu/index.rst.
+Not only it will explain how to write a new DRM driver but it will also
+contain all the information on how to contribute, the Code Of Conduct and
+what is the coding style/documentation. All of that is the same for the
+accel subsystem.
+
+Second, make sure the kernel is configured with CONFIG_DRM_ACCEL.
+
+To expose your device as an accelerator, two changes are needed to
+be done in your driver (as opposed to a standard DRM driver):
+
+- Add the DRIVER_COMPUTE_ACCEL feature flag in your drm_driver's
+ driver_features field. It is important to note that this driver feature is
+ mutually exclusive with DRIVER_RENDER and DRIVER_MODESET. Devices that want
+ to expose both graphics and compute device char files should be handled by
+ two drivers that are connected using the auxiliary bus framework.
+
+- Change the open callback in your driver fops structure to accel_open().
+ Alternatively, your driver can use DEFINE_DRM_ACCEL_FOPS macro to easily
+ set the correct function operations pointers structure.
+
+External References
+===================
+
+email threads
+-------------
+
+* `Initial discussion on the New subsystem for acceleration devices <https://lkml.org/lkml/2022/7/31/83>`_ - Oded Gabbay (2022)
+* `patch-set to add the new subsystem <https://lkml.org/lkml/2022/10/22/544>`_ - Oded Gabbay (2022)
+
+Conference talks
+----------------
+
+* `LPC 2022 Accelerators BOF outcomes summary <https://airlied.blogspot.com/2022/09/accelerators-bof-outcomes-summary.html>`_ - Dave Airlie (2022)