Linux Driver For Arm China's Zhouyi AI Accelerator Proposed, But Lacks Open User-Space

[WorBlux]

"Unfortunately"?

What is good for the goose is good for the gander. If the "new standard" is, apparently, no driver in the kernel until an open source user space client exists (for at least validation if not full utilization), that is the way it will need to be going forward (for this, or other, kernel drivers).

I think it's simply practical. How do you maintain driver if you don't know how user-space is expecting it to work? At the very least you'd need a formal spec, and with a formal spec you'd have enough information to create and open source user-space program anyways.

[onlyLinuxLuvUBack]

He's a fool who knows nothing of the outside world.

Spy chips on Supermicro boards. Pul-leeze, the story was so utterly ridiculous from the get-go that even the US's own Department of Homeland Security basically called it a crapshoot.

As for Superfish, Lenovo is not the only OEM to have preloaded it, and Superfish had already been causing problems since 2010 in the form of drive-by downloads. He's just shitting on Lenovo because they are the only high-profile OEM to have gotten flak for it. Bet he doesn't know that Superfish is not even written by Chinese developers or the Chinese government.

Talking about state-funded hacking and cyberterrorism is a complete joke when the US has been caught with its pants down in slipping actual spyware into appliances and their respective firmwares. Bet he has not ever heard of 'Pegasus'.

And I bet he doesn't know that most of Asia adopt very different values and censorship is seen is a distasteful but necessary evil. But then again, who am I to make comparisons with a 'free' country like the US which boasts about free speech and freedom of expression, and yet immediately launch brutal cancel campaigns against anybody and even whole countries who dares question the 'US good, China bad' narrative?

You gotta think a bit, the us has at least some EPA and plans for fishing future. Nice guys China.gov pretend that they are a small 3rd world country and can pollute everywhere and then they take baby shark/fish/whale and even mothers across the whole pacific. When they break the food chain with their 3000+ fishing fleet in their "close-by" pacific neighbor equador it's probably be the end of sealife. the ocean food source isn't endless.

[Sonadow]

You gotta think a bit, the us has at least some EPA and plans for fishing future. Nice guys China.gov pretend that they are a small 3rd world country and can pollute everywhere and then they take baby shark/fish/whale and even mothers across the whole pacific. When they break the food chain with their 3000+ fishing fleet in their "close-by" pacific neighbor equador it's probably be the end of sealife. the ocean food source isn't endless.

That's rich, talking about an EPA and blaming China for pollution when the US has a drastically higher pollution index per capita.

And refresh my memory, who is the world's largest producer of renewable energy, which country actually has a concrete target and action plan for carbon neutrality, and actually already has a zero-carbon city in existence?

[coder]

And refresh my memory, who is the world's largest producer of renewable energy, which country actually has a concrete target and action plan for carbon neutrality, and actually already has a zero-carbon city in existence?

China is bringing on multitudes of new coal plants, as well as building them around the world. Each new coal plant has a roughly 40-year service life, and is basically committing a certain amount of future pollution.

Among fossil fuels, coal is the worst. The amount of CO2 per W is roughly double for coal as that of natural gas. Worse, coal produces lots of particulate and heavy metals pollution. Remember: when you burn rocks, you're also burning all the other metals and minerals mixed in with those rocks! At least oil is refined somewhat, before it's burnt.

I applaud China's contributions to renewables, but they need to stop playing both sides. Their recent commitments at Glasgow were disappointing. If they want to be a global leader, it starts by acting like one.

BTW, in China State Media's coverage of their recent flooding disasters, they never mention climate change. How are their people going to understand the cost of carbon pollution, if their own media lies to them about it??

[oiaohm]

I think it's simply practical. How do you maintain driver if you don't know how user-space is expecting it to work? At the very least you'd need a formal spec, and with a formal spec you'd have enough information to create and open source user-space program anyways.

Sorry to say a formal specification is not always good enough. Office Open XML from microsoft that got ISO approved is a good example where a formal specification can be missing critical information. Reality is you do need the open source functional implementation as in the reference implementation to make sure what is written in specification is in fact correct. Yes the idea that a formal specification has to be 100 percent complete with enough information to make a working implementation is not true yes that is also demoed by the Office Open XML where if you just stick to the specification you are missing stacks of information.

Formal specification is better than having to completely reverse the item from scratch. But a formal specification and the real world implementation may not exactly match so there will always be need trust but verify with formal specifications.

Yes verify means have a functional implementation the Linux kernel wants that functional implementation in open source this does make sense when you want to run automated validation software at times from beginning to end.

https://linux-test-project.github.io/ its really simple to forgot you need to be able to drive hardware to test the Linux kernel. Closed source user space binary blob is not suitable to be added to the linux test project.

Lack of open user-space with the Linux kernel mainline happened to be a deal breaker.

[mdedetrich]

Is this the same ARM china but went rouge when the CEO of the company refused to listen the board and did a hostile takeover of the company?

[mdedetrich]

China is bringing on multitudes of new coal plants, as well as building them around the world. Each new coal plant has a roughly 40-year service life, and is basically committing a certain amount of future pollution.

Yeah thats a thing a lot of people don't realise, proportionally China builds more coal power plants than other renewable resources. Its ironic because China is the biggest manufacturer of solar panels (for example) but barely uses any of it locally.

EV cars is a different story, but one can again argue the story here is more selfish/visible, originally the main reason for Chinese governments push for EV is

• They don't own any of the tech for combustion engines so they wanted to learn and specialize in EV
• Cars create a lot of smug which is the main reason for the push for it

[oiaohm]

China is bringing on multitudes of new coal plants, as well as building them around the world. Each new coal plant has a roughly 40-year service life, and is basically committing a certain amount of future pollution.

Yeah thats a thing a lot of people don't realise, proportionally China builds more coal power plants than other renewable resources. Its ironic because China is the biggest manufacturer of solar panels (for example) but barely uses any of it locally.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02645-w

China is a mix of mixed messaging. China is going to stop funding building coal power plants outside china. This is going to have impacts on coal price. There will be countries with coal since they will not have coal power plants because china did not fund them their will be no local usage.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/02/chinas-coal-shortage-eases-after-beijing-steps-in-cba-report-shows.html

Interesting enough with China fixed power price could result in the new Coal plants in china turn into white elephants. Coal prices is greater than particular value its not cost effective to burn coal to make electricity in china.

Should be interesting to see if in 2022 after the 2021 great coal short fall if the number of cost effective renewable power plant projects increase in china.

Some of the reason why china is need to build so many new power plants is for higher efficiency.

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3156478/china-and-future-coal-big-burning-global-climate-question

“The average age of a US coal plant is 40 years and many of them are still operating,” he said.
“China’s coal-fired power plants have been operating on average for 12 years but their operating lifespan is 30 years. It will take at least 20 years – until 2040 – to phase out them.

Coder and mdedetrich this bit is very important. China is building a lot of coal power plants but you don't find china coal power plants older than 30 years old because with china restricted electrical price and general coal price its not profitable to run a 31 year old coal power plant so at that point it cheaper to scrap the power plant and build a new one. So the idea that a new power plant in china has a 40 adverage year service life is false that out side china inside china they have a 12 year adverage 30 year max. We could be seeing china coal power plants with less than a 20 year service life in under a decade. Yes the higher the efficiency coal power plants cost more to make with the progressively shorter service life they are coming more of more of a gamble to build a coal power plant and not be left with a white elephant. This is very quickly coming a snow ball. At some point in china its not going to be cost effective to make a coal power plant.

Yes a lot of people don't ask how many power plants are china demolishing every year and what is the max and average age of them. Compare to most of the world china coal power plants are very young and getting younger and this is very much proceeding in the direction of basically going to be still born at some point. Yes one lot of china modeling says that coal power stations could be at the still born point in 20 years(as in the point its not cost effective to build them).

Communist country having polution problem fixed by fixed electrical power price mixed with capitalist power system. Think about it renewable power generation does not transport cost.

Yes China generates the most power from coal making electricity at basically double. But its not double the CO2 produced.

https://www.reuters.com/business/cop/china-cut-coal-use-power-plants-300gkwh-by-2025-2021-11-03/

Average coal use for electricity generation in China fell by about 17.4% in the 15 years till 2020.

This is something that should cause you to take a double take. China is generating massively more power from coal than 15 years go but they are in fact using ~17% less coal to-do it. The reality is horrible. If you removed all the coal power stations outside china you would remove more CO2 production than China coal power plants are doing because there are a lot of 30-50 year old coal power plants around the world that should have been taken out of service due to poor efficiency.

Please note I am not saying I would not be happy if china stopped making new coal power plants. But we do need to take into serous account how bad 30-50 year old coal power plants really are and their end of life outside china does serous-ally need to be speed up.

If you put policy that if a coal power station is over 30 years old it has to be scrapped that would be 80% of the USA coal power stations needing the wrecking ball yes problem is one issues why per head of population USA is so bad on CO2 usage yes worst than china. Yes total USA is only ~11% and china is about -27% but you have to remember how many times bigger China population is to the USA.

China ideal world need to reduce the number of coal power stations they have but with their demand for power this is hard problem. Countries outside china need to stop using highly inefficient power stations preferable stop using coal as well.

After while on coal you notice the countries buddy buddy with china over coal usage have a high emission problem per Kwh of power generally by keeping coal power stations in service way too long. Yes the cost to replace all those old power stations those countries don't want to face.

China should get some credit for keeping the coal power stations reasonable modern so being reasonable good in efficiency.

Its a surprise to most people when you look at coal usage growth in china its not electrical generation that is seeing china increase its coal usage instead its steel production. Yes it scary if China could stop their CO2 from steel production they would drop to USA CO2 emission levels.

They don't own any of the tech for combustion engines so they wanted to learn and specialize in EV

That is badly wrong.

https://www.seetao.com/details/45674.html

You still need combustion engines if you are burning some of the alternative fuel types. China has had the technology to make good combustion engines from a fuel efficiency point of view for quite some time(as in decades). Yes between competitive to better than the engines made outside china. Problem has been reliability. Some of this has been cost cutting the engine blocks until they don't have enough metal for long term usage so they crack.

There is still funding in china for combustion engine research. The requirements for the past 5 years have been that the engine has to be high efficiency and high reliability. You can think of the china made combustion engine having the problem too much focus on efficiency. I can understand thinking that china did not own any tech for combustion engines when 15 year ago you had the problem you would buy a China engine and it would barely do 50000Km before cracking some where critical so no one wanted one. Yes it did that 50000km with great efficiency just had bugger all long term reliability.

Cars create a lot of smug which is the main reason for the push for it

Yes you are right this is the major reason. The minor reason is China had badly goofed up their combustion engine R&D by having a pure focus on efficiency at the best final unit price with no requirement for reliability and mass producing those engines. The china combustion engine proves have all the technology in the world to make a good product yet then for decades be mass producing lemons products because you have left a critical feature off the requirements list.

Common mistake is to think just because someone is making highly unreliable items that they don't have the technology to make good ones. Yes china reputation for engines could seriously flip on ear. Yes there are many china companies that have done the R&D to be able to make good combustion engines based on their own technology as long as they stop stupid cost cutting that makes the engine unreliable long term..