Linux 5.7 Gets A Unified/User-Space-Access-Intended Accelerator Framework

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Kernel on 1 April 2020 at 01:25 PM EDT. Add A Comment
LINUX KERNEL
The Linux 5.7 crypto subsystem updates include new drivers.

Linux 5.7 is progressing through its two-week merge window and while only a quarter of the way through, it's certainly seeing a number of interesting and new drivers.

The crypto subsystem is introducing the UACCE driver, which was worked on by Linaro and HiSilicon. UACCE stands for the "Unified/User-space-access-intended Accelerator Framework." UACCE was described in its patch series as providing "Shared Virtual Addressing (SVA) between accelerators and processes. So accelerator can access any data structure of the main CPU. This differs from the data sharing between CPU and I/O device, which share only data content rather than address. Since unified address, hardware and user space of process can share the same virtual address in the communication."

UACCE lets user-space processes access the hardware without any kernel interaction in the data path. Previous patch series for UACCE have also brought up the possibility of extending this accelerator-focused framework for offering other features.

HiSilicon's QM driver is the initial user of this framework.

UACCE comes as part of the crypto subsystem pull. Also in the crypto updates is a new Xilinx AES driver. This driver is for enabling the AES-GCM encryption/decryption engine found with the Xilinx ZynqMP.

More details on all of the crypto changes for Linux 5.7 via this pull request.
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