The past several months has seen [1]AMD engineers working on a new RDMA driver for Ionic hardware through which they [2]acquired Pensando a few years ago. That AMD-Pensando Ionic RDMA driver is now part of the upstream Linux 6.18 kernel.

The new "ionic" RDMA driver supports the AMD Pensando Ethernet device with Remote Direct Memory Access capabilities. Merged way back in 2019 was [3]an original Pensando driver for Linux in supporting the company's original network hardware.

Since AMD's acquisition more Pensando IP/hardware has been enabled in the mainline Linux kernel such as the [4]Elba SoC and more for helping to bolster AMD's data center ambitions.

Over on the Intel side, the RDMA pull for Linux 6.18 includes IRDMA "GEN3" hardware support. This "GEN3" hardware support is for RDMA RoCEv2 with the IPU E2000 product line.

More details on these changes and the other RDMA happenings for Linux 6.18 via [5]this pull request , which has since been merged to Linux Git.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Pensando-RDMA-Driver

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Acquiring-Pensando

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-5.4-Pensando-Ionic-Driver

[4] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.7-SoC-Updates

[5] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20251003000244.GA3344797@nvidia.com/