Intel open-source software engineers last week posted a set of patches for a new driver: iXD. The three letter acronym party continues and this time even more difficult to decipher than some of their other obscure driver names.

Intel iXD? This new driver is for supporting the Control Plane PCI Function on Intel E2100 and newer IPUs and FNICs. The iXD driver is to take a prime role with their Infrastructure Processing Unit (IPU) and Fabric Channel NICs (FNICs). The patch series from Intel engineer Larysa Zaremba explains:

"This patch series adds the iXD driver, which supports the Intel(R) Control Plane PCI Function on Intel E2100 and later IPUs and FNICs. It facilitates a centralized control over multiple IDPF PFs/VFs/SFs exposed by the same card. The reason for the separation is to be able to offload the control plane to the host different from where the data plane is running.

This is the first phase in the release of this driver where we implement the initialization of the core PCI driver. Subsequent phases will implement advanced features like usage of idpf ethernet aux device, link management, NVM update via devlink, switchdev port representors, data and exception path, flow rule programming, etc."

The Intel iXD driver code builds upon Intel Data Path Function (IDPF) driver. Much of the driver development focus at this time is around the Intel E2100 IPUs.

Should this Intel Control Plane PCI Function IPU/FNIC driver be of interest to your computing needs, learn more via [1]this patch series currently under review on the Linux kernel mailing list.



[1] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20250408124816.11584-1-larysa.zaremba@intel.com/