Lucky 13? AMD Pensando Elba SoC Linux Enablement Revised The 13th Time

For more than one year and now up to thirteen rounds of patch review, the AMD Pensando Elba SoC support continues in its trek toward the mainline Linux kernel.

It was nearly one year ago to the day that AMD announced it was acquiring Pensando Systems. Throughout the past year AMD-Pensando engineers have been working to upstream their Elba SoC support for the Linux kernel with this data processing unit that sports sixteen Cortex-A72 cores, dual DDR4/DDR5 memory controllers, up to dual 200GE or quad 100GE networking, and a variety of other features catering to the DPU space.

While Pensando engineers have been contributing to the Linux kernel for years back to when they were a stealth start-up, getting the Elba SoC support upstreamed into the kernel has proven to be quite time consuming.

The AMD Pensando Elba DPU is found in network devices like the Aruba CX 10000 series switches.

They've continued every few weeks revising the patches and now this week are up to their 13th take on these enablement patches.

The v13 patches are up to 15 patches adding over just one thousand lines of new code and DT files to the kernel. The v13 patches have just some basic updates over the prior revision. We'll see now if the patches are deemed ready for mainline in which case they could still potentially make it for the upcoming v6.4 kernel cycle or if further revisions are still warranted.