ONGOING DEVELOPMENT

Oded Gabbay is kernel team lead at Habana Labs, a machine learning company that was acquired by Intel. Oded builds a plug-in accelerator card known as Gaudi. Unlike many businesses, Intel is supportive of upstream Linux, and in fact is one of the only such companies with an upstream driver – Gaudi2 with support landeding in 6.0.

But the process of upstreaming such support hasn’t always gone as smoothly as it could have, in large part due to the lack of a suitable kernel framework. It’s this that Oded is trying to improve in proposing a new “accel” framework.

He kicked this off back at the end of July, and there were a series of discussions under a thread titled “New subsystem for acceleration devices”. According to Oded, “Accelerators drivers will use the DRM (video rendering) subsystem code, but they will be located in a different directory (drivers/accel) and will be exposed to the userspace using a new drive char name (dev/accelX)”. Well-known Linux graphics developer Dave Airlie has a summary from LPC on his blog: https://bit.ly/lxf295accel.

RISC-V has received large numbers of updates in Linux 6.0. A recent set of patches from Dmitry Kasatkin and team aim to produce support for the “CHERI” capability architecture on RISC-V Linux systems. CHERI comes from Cambridge University and aspires to be a modern take on an older idea (capabilities), introducing much stronger memory isolation between programs than historically possible. CHERI is strongly associated with Arm, who also has a “Morello” test chip program in flight.

Finally this month, as promised a while back, the last vestiges of support for “a.out” legacy binary format files are scheduled for removal in Linux 6.1.