Xilinx Volleys Latest Open-Source Alveo Accelerator Driver Code

Back in March 2019 Xilinx announced they were looking to upstream their Alveo FPGA accelerator drivers into the mainline kernel code. They followed through with posting the initial kernel patches and then fast forward to the end of 2020 they posted a new iteration of the patches. This month the company, which is in the process of being acquired by AMD, posted the third iteration of their open-source Linux kernel driver patches.

The "v3" patches for the Xilinx XRT Alveo driver enablement for these PCIe accelerator cards is now under review. The new version of the patches has streamlined the driver framework, updated documentation, addressed test issues, and made other changes. In current form the Alveo driver code for the Linux kernel is just shy of ten thousand lines of code. This third version arrived just days before the two year anniversary of Xilinx announcing their open-source accelerator driver kernel plans and their initial patches.

Meanwhile in user-space and as part of AMD's collaboration and pending acquisition, Xilinx FPGA support is coming to ROCm.

The latest Xilinx XRT Alveo driver patches can be found on the kernel mailing list where it's still undergoing review. It's too late for Linux 5.12 but we'll see if by chance the code is ready for mainline come 5.13 this summer.