Char/Misc Additions For Linux 5.8 Headlined By Intel / Habana Labs Gaudi Support

Written by Michael Larabel in Hardware on 9 June 2020 at 12:09 AM EDT. Add A Comment
HARDWARE
The char/misc pull request for Linux 5.8 is big at nearly one hundred thousand lines of new code.

The char/misc pull sent in by Greg Kroah-Hartman on Sunday is already merged and includes:

- Habana Labs Gaudi accelerator support, the AI training accelerator and complementing the company's Goya AI inference accelerator that is already backed by this mainline kernel driver. The Gaudi AI accelerator support has been a long time coming but is now all wired up with the open-source kernel driver in Linux 5.8. Habana Labs was recently acquired by Intel to bolster their AI efforts.

- Various low-level improvements to the Qualcomm MHI bus introduced last cycle.

- Runtime power management support within the SoundWire code.

- Support for the Arm Neoverse N1 ETM and Qualcomm SC7180 within the etm4x Coresight driver code along with other general Arm Coresight improvements.

The char/misc pull request has nearly 99k lines of new code and 2.6k lines of code removed, most of that new code addition is due to the Habana Labs activity. There had been talk of introducing an "accelerator" subsystem for the AI hardware and other accelerators but as of Linux 5.8 these drivers still live within char/misc. Full list of char/misc work via the kernel pull request.
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