Ethernet Driver Support For NVIDIA's BlueField-3 DPU Coming To Linux 6.3

NVIDIA engineers are working on upstreaming support for the new BlueField-3 DPU into the Linux kernel. This DPU rated for 400 Gb/s networking will see Ethernet driver support come Linux 6.3.

The NVIDIA BlueField-3 data processing unit supports 400 Gb/s Ethernet or 400 Gb/s InfiniBand network connectivity and designed for the software-defined networking needs of the next-generation data center.

Queued last week into the networking subsystem's "net-next" branch is enabling the mlxbf_gige Ethernet driver support for the BlueField-3 SoC. Various driver additions over the existing BlueField-2 SoC has enabled this third-generation data processing unit to work with the same driver.

The NVIDIA BlueField-3 chip has up to 16 Arm Cortex-A78 cores, a 16 core / 256 thread programmable datapath accelerator, dual DDR5-5600 DRAM controllers with ECC support, and other robust features for accelerating software-defined networking.

More details for those interested via this Git merge with the BlueField-3 Ethernet support now residing there until the Linux 6.3 merge window opens in mid-February.