Intel has readied a new "qat_6xxx" driver for the Linux kernel for supporting QAT GEN6 devices with QuickAssist Technology. QAT GEN6 will presumably be found with upcoming Xeon 6 Clearwater Forest and Diamond Rapids processors while the Linux kernel driver should be introduced for Linux 6.16.

Queued into the cryptography subsystem's "cryptodev" branch ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.16 merge window is this new Intel QAT GEN6 open-source driver. This succeeds the existing mainline QAT4 driver support. The driver patch from Intel is described as:

"Add a new driver, qat_6xxx, to support QAT GEN6 devices. QAT GEN6 devices are a follow-on generation of GEN4 devices and differently from the previous generation, they can support all three services (symmetric, asymmetric, and data compression) concurrently.

In order to have the qat_6xxx driver to reuse some of the GEN4 logic, a new abstraction layer has been introduced to bridge the two implementations. This allows to avoid code duplication and to keep the qat_6xxx driver isolated from the GEN4 logic. This approach has been used for the PF to VF logic and the HW CSR access logic."

Intel QuickAssist Technology has proven useful for encrypting/decrypting network traffic and various data compression needs.

The Intel QAT GEN6 driver is in cryptodev via [1]this patch and various prep patches ahead of the Linux 6.16 merge window opening in a few weeks.



[1] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/herbert/cryptodev-2.6.git/commit/?id=17fd7514ae68c541bf952876ce2005cb4a53f283