Debian Adds Intel's accel-config To Package Archive

Being introduced to the Debian package archive this week is accel-config as Intel's new user-space component for configuring the DSA accelerators found with the new 4th Gen Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors.

Intel's accel-config open-source user-space component is used for setting up the accelerators found with the new 4th Gen Xeon Scalable processors, like the Xeon Platinum 8490H. This configures the Data Streaming Accelerator (DSA) devices exposed by the IDXD kernel driver, which has been mainlined since Linux 5.18.

With these accelerators they just aren't straight-forward to immediately use but first need to be configured and enabled either via poking at them via sysfs to configure directly or more easy for administrators is using the accel-config command-line utility for controlling the accelerators, putting them in groups / workqueues, etc. The accel-config also allows loading and saving profiles/configurations for easily restoring the accelerator configurations at a later time or sharing configurations across a fleet of identical servers.

The accel-config software is available from intel/idxd-config on GitHub for those wanting to build it from source paired with a recent kernel having the IDXD kernel driver. But new this week is it being added to Debian for the accel-config utility and libaccel-config library to ease the setup of Sapphire Rapids' accelerators moving forward on Debian and in turn with time trickling down to Debian-based Linux distributions. The accel-config package is also already found in the Ubuntu 23.04 "Lunar" repository ahead of its April introduction.

Those wishing to learn more about the process of configuring the DSA accelerators for use on Linux can see this Intel page with the linked Intel Data Streaming Accelerator User Guide. As mentioned in my Xeon Platinum 8490H review, a number of accelerator benchmarks are being worked on and will begin appearing in various articles over the coming days.

Other Linux distributions catering to Intel's new server processors will likely be picking up accel-config/idxd-config with time too and there are also other new libraries like the QPL library that Linux distributions will likely package too as more open-source software is adapted to make use of Intel's new accelerators.