Upstream the driver

[DemiMarie]

Would it be possible to upstream the driver, either as part of amdgpu or as a separate driver?

[yunxiali]

Upstreaming would be difficult since our driver is built as a shim layer + kernel agnostic core, Linux upstream usually prefer drivers to be tightly integrated with the rest of the kernel instead.

[DemiMarie]

A different AMD driver had a similar problem and was able to fix it enough for upstreaming.

[ljymonk]

We thought about this internally in the past and there are couple reason we didn't pick this mode:

1. compatible issues might introduced cross host OS (kernel) and GIM if go upstream,
2. GIM is a fork of LIBGV which is the core share component for other AMD hypervisor driver, e.g.: hyper V and ESXi, upstream GIM requires the decouple of GIM and LIBGV, which is exactly the opposite direction of LIBGV.

[DemiMarie]

Without upstreaming the driver its use in Linux will be quite limited, especially because Intel and NVIDIA are already planning on upstreaming their drivers.