Kalray Updates Patches For Their Linux Kernel Port To The KV3-1 "Coolidge" SoC

Way back at the start of 2023, French fabless semiconductor company Kalray posted Linux kernel patches for a "KVX" Linux kernel port to get Linux up and running on their MPPA3-80 "Coolidge" DPU SoC with the KV3-1 CPU architecture. A year and a half later this work still is outside the Linux kernel but finally a third iteration of the KVX Linux kernel port has been posted for review.

The Kalray MPPA3-80 is part of their "Massively Parallel Processor Array" architecture and intended as a Data Processing Unit (DPU) designed for data analysis and a variety of other "intelligent systems" needs. The Kalray DPU is advertised as being able to accelerate AI analytics, line-rate encryption/decryption/hashing, smart load balancing, RAID6 erasure coding, Computer Vision (CV) acceleration, and endless other high performance data processing needs. Kalray has been working to get the Linux kernel support mainlined along with associated support into the GCC compiler and other open-source toolchain components as the "KVX" architecture.

The KV3-1 Coolidge SoC is described as having 4MB of on-chip SMEM, one dedicated safety/security core, 16 x "Processing Elements" KV3-1 cores, 16 co-processors, and two crypto accelerators. The SoC supports dual 100G Ethernet, eight PCIe Gen4 controllers, and other common connectivity options.

Before the Linux kernel port can be merged the KVX compiler support will first need to be accepted into upstream GCC. With the KVX v3 Linux kernel patches all of the code has been re-based against the upstream Linux 6.10 kernel state compared to v6.1 when the patches were last posted. There is also various code updates to address prior review comments, DeviceTree bindings for all drivers, dropping legacy syscall support, and a variety of other code improvements.

Those interested in the upstream Kalray KVX Linux kernel porting effort can see the v3 RFC patches for more details on this new CPU architecture enablement.