Intel Keem Bay Accelerated Hashing Driver Positioned For Linux 5.12

Keem Bay, Intel's third-generation Movidius VPU (Vision Processing Unit), continues seeing more upstream open-source hardware support within the Linux kernel. Coming to the Linux 5.12 kernel in a couple months will be more support within the crypto subsystem.

The Keem Bay VPU features much faster inference performance over its predecessors and intended for edge computing with use-cases from drones to other computer vision scenarios. The ARM-based SoC that is part of Keem Bay has yielded a lot of upstream kernel bits over time as well as a brand new DRM kernel driver needed for display support with this latest Movidius product.

With Linux 5.11 comes the Keem Bay Offload Crypto Subsystem (OC) support while Linux 5.12 is further building off the OCS functionality. Queued in the "cryptodev" Git branch ahead of the Linux 5.12 merge window is now the Keem Bay OCS HCU driver.

HCU in the Keem Bay context is for the Hashing Control Unit and is part of the OCS. The HCU provides hardware-accelerated hashing for SHA256, SHA384, SHA512, SM3, and optionally SHA224 (as well as HMAC variants). This code set to be introduced for Linux 5.12 wires up all of that functionality.

That crypto subsystem work for Keem Bay can be tracked here. The Linux 5.12 cycle will kick off after the Linux 5.11 release that should happen in February. It depends upon how the 5.11 timing plays out and how quickly 5.12 stabilizes but in turn that stable kernel should be out in May.