New Cyborg Generic Driver Proposal

This spec proposes to provide the initial design for Cyborg generic device driver.

Problem description

Currently, the FPGA and GPU have been supported in Cyborg, but the capability for the generic accelerator is not supported yet.

In general, these generic devices are the specific accelerators in some specific scenarios. For example:

  • The AI chips. which can be used for AI training and inference.

  • The security accelerator, which can be used for encryption and decryption.

In order to add the support for these specific accelerators, we propose to improve the generic driver to manage these devices. We propose to improve the existing GenericDriver.

Use Cases

  • As an AI chip vendor, I want to add the driver in Cyborg, but the existing driver type doesn’t meet our requirement. We hope the driver can provide the firmware upgrade, device configure, device stats query.

  • As a security accelerator vendor, I want add the driver in Cyborg with security accelerator configure and device stats query

Proposed change

1. The Generic driver change As the initial version, the new GenericDriver should include the following attributes:

  • VENDOR: the vendor name of the driver.

  • TYPE: the type of the driver, such as, “FPGA”, “GPU”

and the following interfaces also should be included:

  • discover() Discover specific accelerator

  • update(control_path, image_path): Upgrade the device firmware with a specific image. control_path: the image update control path of device. image_path: The image path of the firmware binary, the image would be downloaded by Cyborg agent.

  • get_stats(): Collects device stats. The get_stats method is used to collect information from the device about the device capabilities. Such as performance info like temprature, power, volt, packet_count info. The response of get_stats should follow the current Cyborg device-deploy-accelerator model.

    A real stats look like:

    {
  "device": {
    "device_name": "XXX",                 # Standard properties
    "device_number": "RFD1644N48373",     # Standard properties
    "properties": {                       # Vendor/Custom properties
      "id": "1",
      "temperature": "26",
      "volt": "",
      "packet_count": "",
      "memeory": {
        "model": "DDR4",
        "description": ""
      },
      "board": {

      },
      "flash": {

      }
    }
    "deploy": [
        {
          "accelerator": {
             "acc_name": "",               # Standard properties
             "properties": {               # Vendor/Custom properties
             }
          }
        },
        {
          "accelerator": {
             "acc_name": "",               # Standard properties
             "properties": {               # Vendor/Custom properties
             }
          }
        }
    ]
  }
}

This GenericDriver should not be used directly, after adding this GenericDriver, for every new device, we need to introduce a new driver that inherits from this GenericDriver.

2. Existing driver change We should also improve FPGA and GPU driver to inherit from this driver and implements the base driver interface.

The generic FPGA driver interface: The discover, update, get_accelerator_stats should be implemented in the FPGA driver. And the below interface is the FPGA specifc interface:

  • program(controlpath, image_path) Program the FPGA with the provided bitstream image.

The generic GPU driver interface: The discover, update, get_accelerator_stats should be implemented in the GPU driver.

Alternatives

None

Data model impact

None

REST API impact

None

Security impact

None

Notifications impact

None

Other end user impact

None

Performance Impact

None

Other deployer impact

None

Developer impact

None

Implementation

Assignee(s)

Primary assignee: Yikun Jiang <yikunkero@gmail.com> Sundar Nadathur <sundar.nadathur@intel.com> wangzhh <wangzh21@lenovo.com>

Work Items

  • Improve the generic driver for generic device

  • Improve the existing FPGA driver

  • Improve the existing GPU driver

Dependencies

Testing

Documentation Impact

None

References

None

History

Revisions

Release Name

Description

Train

Introduced