Habana Labs Goya AI Processor Support Queued For Linux 5.1

Published back in January were initial open-source kernel driver patches for Habana Labs' Goya processor intended for accelerating deep learning workloads. This new Habana Labs kernel driver will debut with the mainline Linux 5.1 kernel.

The tens of thousands of lines of kernel code (not counting user-space work) enabling the Habana Labs Goya has been queued this week ahead of the Linux 5.1 merge window that will be kicking off as soon as Linux 5.0 ships.

This mainline kernel driver work for the Goya has been led by Oded Gabbay, who is employed by Habana Labs and likely familiar with some Phoronix readers due to also serving as the maintainer of the AMDKFD "kernel fusion driver" code.

Habana Labs intends to extend this driver over the course of the year to support their next-generation "Gaudi" hardware as well. Goya is focused on inference performance while Gaudi will be released in 2019 and focused on delivering superb training performance.

While there is talk of introducing a hardware accelerator subsystem for the Linux kernel, this new driver is currently living within the char-misc space.

The kernel driver is obviously open-source in full but not all of their Habana user-space libraries appear to be completely open, at least at this time.

More details on the hardware at Habana.ai.