Qualcomm QAIC Accelerator Driver Coming With Linux 6.4

Following the Intel Meteor Lake VPU driver being added to the new accelerator "accel" subsystem in Linux 6.3 along with converting over the Habana Labs AI driver, coming in Linux 6.4 is now the Qualcomm QAIC Cloud AI driver to this subsystem that lives within the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) umbrella.

Sent out today were a new round of drm-misc-next updates targeting the Linux 6.4 kernel cycle via DRM-Next. There are various small driver fixes and other DRM core changes in this pull. Plus the Qualcomm QAIC driver is being mainlined for the first time.

Going back a year Qualcomm posted the QAIC driver for their Cloud AI 100 accelerator. At that time it began as a conventional DRM driver prior to the accelerator subsystem coming together. Qualcomm engineers continued iterating and improving this driver while last month they published the open-source user-space and compiler support for QAIC.

With the QAIC driver now in good shape for the accel framework plus having the open-source user-space, the kernel driver is ready for upstreaming. It's part of this DRM-Misc-Next pull for introduction in Linux 6.4.

Adding this QAIC accelerator driver is just under 5k lines of new code. The Qualcomm Cloud AI 100 features up to 16 AI cores on a 7nm process, up to 32GB of LPDDR4x system memory in a quad channel configuration., and is designed for AI inference from the cloud to the edge.