Intel Gaudi 3 Linux Driver Support Expected Next Month

Intel used their Enterprise Tech Tour last week in Oregon to not only provide insight into the new Xeon 6900 "Granite Rapids" server processors (and Xeon 6980P benchmarks) but also to shed more light on their Gaudi 3 AI inference accelerator. The question I was most curious about with Gaudi 3: where's the Linux driver support?

Back in April is when Intel originally announced the Gaudi 3 AI accelerator. Since then I've been on the look-out for the Linux kernel driver patches to the "habanalabs" accel driver but so far have not seen any patches materialize. This is in stark contrast to Gaudi 2 where Intel announced Guadi 2 in May 2022 at their Vision conference and already one month after that the Gaudi 2 Linux driver patches began surfacing. Here we are now approaching six months since Gaudi 3 was originally announced and still there haven't been any public kernel driver patches on the mailing lists. This is even more problematic when considering the elongated release cycles for the Linux kernel.

So I asked about the Gaudi 3 Linux driver support timing and was told during the Enterprise Tech Tour that it should come with their October software release.

So hopefully the Gaudi 3 driver support will indeed be published in the next month, but the timing still doesn't make too much sense and is less than ideal. Getting out the Gaudi 3 driver patches only in October means it would be upstreamed to Linux v6.13 at the earliest. The Linux 6.13 merge window will open in November following the Linux 6.12 release while that stable v6.13 kernel won't be out until February. So if the Gaudi 3 support is published next month and reviewed timely and all goes well, it could still make Linux 6.13 for appearing stable early next year and out-of-the-box in distributions next spring like Ubuntu 25.04. But an October date for the code drop does give just a few weeks for the code review and any revisions, so hopefully the timing works out and isn't delayed past v6.13.

Still though it's too bad the code drop didn't happen weeks ago and potentially could have made it into the habanalabs driver for Linux 6.12 given that it will be this year's Long Term Support (LTS) kernel version. Potentially having complicated the Gaudi 3 upstreaming plans / timing compared to Gaudi 2 is that earlier this year their long-time driver maintainer Oded Gabbay stepped away from Intel. Just two months after that the then-new-maintainer of the driver also left Intel.

At the Enterprise Tech Tour Intel put Gaudi 3 accelerator availability as "select availability" in Q4 and general availability coming in 2025. As far as when in 2025 remains to be explicitly laid out, so if the Gaudi 3 support does make it into Linux 6.13 the timing may be fine for those riding the fresh upstream kernel code. Presumably Intel also has a DKMS module or similar for those running older enterprise vendor kernels.

Hopefully the Gaudi 3 open-source driver support remains in great shape like Gaudi and Gaudi 2. The habanalabs driver remains one of the flagship kernel "accel" drivers that Intel engineers helped to establish that new subsystem in the kernel.