Maintenance of pytorch/cpuinfo

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Hi folks - it was recommended I reach out here from Fix chipset enum name to include 'vendor_' by prashanthswami · Pull Request #210 · pytorch/cpuinfo · GitHub - recently, the primary maintainer of pytorch/cpuinfo has transitioned off the project, so there isn’t an official maintainer anymore that has bandwidth to review patches. malfet@ on the above PR has been kind to review a number of RISC-V patches myself and others have been sending over, but it’s consuming a lot of bandwidth and a proper maintainer needs to be assigned to balance the load.

While there are a few folks contributing patches, my stake here is Android RISC-V and by extension, libraries like XNNPACK that are used on Android that would need RISC-V support. I’m flagging this purely as a “there’s an active need from the community to make changes in service of enabling RISC-V”. There are already gaps appearing that would break future rolls of pytorch for RISC-V: Fix RISC-V Linux build by markdryan · Pull Request #212 · pytorch/cpuinfo · GitHub

Of course, I don’t want to just drop a resource request out of the blue! I’m here to ask what the process is and what sort of help can be provided to find a maintainer.

  1. Is there some committee that identifies / assigns new maintainers?
  2. Can I follow along somewhere to be informed if a new maintainer is selected?
  3. If someone needs to be found, and I find someone who is interested, can they offer to help maintain this library / who would I point them to that could evaluate / approve them?
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Hello!

Thank you for reaching out and raising this issue!
1/2. I’m afraid there is no pool of people to assign a maintainer from so not really.
3. We are always welcoming new maintainers! The short story is that maintainership is awarded on merit and so if someone is able to do the maintenance job (follow up on issue and review PRs) for a couple of month then they can become a full maintainer.

You can find more details at PyTorch Governance | Mechanics — PyTorch 2.1 documentation

cc @gottbrath this would be a good topic to raise at the next core maintainer meeting.

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would any of the Intel folks who have been maintaining the CPU stuff be interested? Maybe someone from your teams who want to step up / looking for maintainership?
cc: @jgong5 @mingfeima @XiaobingSuper

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Sure, we are glad to help. Feel free to add @jgong5 @mingfeima and @xuhancn as the maintainers. In order to better maintain the project, there are a couple things we would need help:

  1. Is there anyone who we can approach to learn how the project was run in the past? For example, how are the CI/CD maintained and run? What is the process for upgrade to PyTorch core?
  2. The project supports many CPU archs. For non-x86 CPUs, do you have recommendation how to find experts if we need any help?
  3. For non-x86 CPUs, is there any available hardware for us to debug problems?