== Summary ==
A number of devices like Xilinx ZYNQ based devices such as the
96boards Ultra96 and the Intel based UP² have onboard FPGAs. FPGA
manager is a vendor-neutral framework that has been upstream in the
kernel since 4.4. This is the initial support for FPGAs in Fedora
using open source vendor agnostic tools.

== Owner ==
* Name: Peter Robinson
* Email: pbrobinson at fedora project dot org

== Detailed Description ==

The use of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning is growing.
There's a number types of compute power used to drive this, the
standard system CPU can handle basic work, but for more powerful needs
this workload gets moved to auxiliary processors such as GPGPU, FPGAs
or Neural Network processors. This will add initial support for FPGAs
in Fedora using the Linux Kernel support which currently supports
Altera,  Zynq, Lattice and other FPGAs. The use of FPGAs with Open
Source software is improving and this is the beginning of ensuring
that can be consumed in Fedora as easily as possible.

== Benefit to Fedora ==

The general purpose use of FPGAs is growing in the tech industry,
especially in AI and Machine Learning usecases for IoT and numerous
other places where special purpose workload acceleration is needed.
This will help developing these workloads on top of Fedora for use
across the distribution.

== Scope ==
* Proposal owners: Kernel and userspace changes

* Other developers: N/A (not a System Wide Change)

== Upgrade/compatibility impact ==
There is no impact to upgrades or platforms that don't contain FPGAs.

== How To Test ==
Testing will require hardware with a supported FPGA. The initial
devices for this will be a 96boards Ultra96 or a UP² with a Altera
FPGA. Other devices will be supported and testing will be welcome.

The process for testing will be linked to here.

== User Experience ==
Currently the Fedora support for FPGAs is basically non existent.
There's currently a few open tools for specific FPGAs. This is the
beginning of improving this with the intention of having a uniform as
possible  user experience across FPGAs as is currently possible.


--
Ben Cotton
Fedora Program Manager
TZ=America/Indiana/Indianapolis
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