Patches queued up this month into net-next ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel merge window add support for the Airoha NPU... Not to be confused with the Neural Processing Unit (NPU) that is all the rage these days for helping with AI, the Airoha NPU is a Network Processor Unit.

The Airoha NPU is a RISC-V module found within the Airoha EN7581 SoC for wired and wireless hardware flow offloading Packet Processor Engine (PPE). The EN7581 series SoC is a quad-core ARM CPU with 8-core RISC-V network processor (the "NPU") for providing WAN, WLAN WiFi 6 / WiFi 7, and LAN handling with smart packet acceleration. This SoC is intended for use within 10G-PON residential and enterprise gateways.

Now at least with the code queued within [1]net-next for the upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel, there will be mainline support for this RISC-V network processor.



[1] https://web.git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/netdev/net-next.git/commit/?id=23290c7bc190def4e1ca61610992d9b7c32e33f3