Xilinx Continues Their Open-Source FPGA Upstreaming Push For The Linux Kernel

Earlier this month we covered the news of Xilinx is looking to upstream their open-source "AI Engine" driver to the Linux kernel. This comes as Xilinx and AMD are working on Radeon Open eCosystem (ROCm) support for their FPGAs with AMD being in the process of acquiring the FPGA giant. Now more open-source code is looking to be included in the Linux kernel tree.

Sent out on Saturday were more patches around the Xilinx Alveo accelerator and the Xilinx Runtime (XRT) open-source stack.

Another set of eight patches were sent out building off their earlier kernel patches as they work to get the Xilinx Runtime open-source stack out there and the kernel portions mainlined. The current focus is on bringing up their Alveo PCIe accelerator cards.

The latest batch of 17k lines of kernel driver code can be found on the kernel mailing list where it's awaiting review and comments.

While there appears to be a newfound open-source push at the time while AMD and Xilinx are hooking up, going back to early 2019 Xilinx was looking to upstream their kernel code albeit at the time didn't make much progress and appeared to have stalled until now.

It will be interesting to see what AMD and Xilinx can do with the open-source FPGA ecosystem support in 2021.