Habana Labs Aims To Upstream Gaudi AI Accelerator Code For Linux 5.7~5.8

Habana Labs, the AI start-up being bought out by Intel, is still striving towards upstreaming their Gaudi processor support code for AI training.

Habana Labs has been a good member of the open-source community with having mainlined their driver in the Linux kernel a year ago. That initial focus was on the Goya AI inference processor while now they have been working on bringing up Gaudi too under this open-source kernel code.

They've spent months on future ASIC support and Goya while for the now-open Linux 5.6 cycle they are making more adjustments to their code but with no new support in tow. For Linux 5.6 the Habana Labs accelerator driver has at least been making MMU code improvements, bug fixes, and other adjustments.

Linux driver maintainer Oded Gabbay commented on the mailing list, "Hopefully I will have time to work on upstreaming the Gaudi support code for the next kernel, but it may be postponed to 5.8."

When Intel's acquisition of Habana Labs is complete, we have no doubt Intel will continue with the open-source kernel driver given their track record with open-source drivers of their own hardware. In fact, the open-source situation could become even better... Right now the Habana Lans user-space software is closed-source but hopefully under Intel's watch that will go open-source presumably as they begin incorporating Intel's oneAPI support.