Intel IAA Crypto Compression Driver To Be Merged For Linux 6.8
The IAA accelerator has been supported under Linux since the debut of Sapphire Rapids one year ago, but it's been limited to user-space applications specifically targeting the IAA block with various early software adoption limitations. With Linux 6.8 there will be this driver that supports the kernel crypto API and can be used by kernel code targeting the API like Zswap and zRAM. The driver currently implements both sync and async versions of DEFLATE.
Intel has been working on this IAA kernel driver for months and it's shown very promising results:
With Linux 6.8 this IAA kernel driver will be present for accelerating this in-kernel API. This past week the driver patches were queued into cryptodev-2.6.git by crypto subsystem maintainer Herbert Xu. In turn the Intel IAA crypto driver will be sent in for the Linux 6.8 merge window opening up at the start of 2024. Linux 6.8 stable in turn will be out around early March.
One of the pain points of IAA and the other Xeon accelerator IP does remain though: the initial setup is a bit of a nuisance and doesn't "just work" even for a simple single-user deployment. Per the iaa-crypto driver documentation from Intel:
"Because the IAA Compression Accelerator requires significant user setup in order to be used properly, this adds documentation on the iaa_crypto driver including setup, usage, and examples."
Hopefully moving forward they will continue to find ways to improve the IAA/accelerator setup process and to reduce that "significant user setup" to allow for these accelerators to be more easily leveraged on modern Intel Xeon Scalable servers. In any case seeing this IAA crypto driver set for mainline with Linux 6.8 is quite exciting and now opens up users of the in-kernel crypto API to tapping the Intel Analytics Accelerator potential.
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