The newest driver proposed for the Linux kernel's accelerator "accel" subsystem is named QDA and is a Qualcomm DSP Accelerator driver.

A request for comments (RFC) patch series was posted today for this Qualcomm DSP Accelerator driver for Hexagon DPs and provides a standardized interface for offloading computational tasks to DSPs found on Qualcomm SoCs and covering all DSP domains of ADSP, CDSP, SDSP, and GDSP.

This Qualcomm QDA driver aims to be an alternative to Qualcomm's FastRPC driver living within the kernel's drivers/misc/ area. This new accelerator driver jives with the accel subsystem, provides better resource management, and other features similar to other accelerator drivers.

* Standard DRM accelerator interface via /dev/accel/accelN

* GEM-based buffer management with DMA-BUF import/export support

* IOMMU-based memory isolation using per-process context banks

* FastRPC protocol implementation for DSP communication

* RPMsg transport layer for reliable message passing

* Support for all DSP domains (ADSP, CDSP, SDSP, GDSP)

* Comprehensive IOCTL interface for DSP operations

The QDA driver in current form with today's [1]patch series comes in at 4,665 lines of C code.

There is an open-source user-space driver to interface with QDA via Qualcomm's [2]FastRPC accel/staging GitHub branch .



[1] https://lore.kernel.org/dri-devel/20260224-qda-firstpost-v1-0-fe46a9c1a046@oss.qualcomm.com/T/

[2] https://github.com/qualcomm/fastrpc/tree/accel/staging