The IRDMA driver as [1]Intel's modern Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) Linux driver for their high-end Ethernet network controllers is preparing support for new hardware.

Last year the IRDMA driver tacked on [2]Intel's GEN3 hardware support that ended up being for the IPU E2000 product line. Now merged for Linux 7.1 is supporting GEN4 hardware.

The enablement patch simply notes that Intel's GEN4 hardware is "similar to GEN3" and indeed from the driver side it's mostly adding "IRDMA_GEN_4" along existing IRDMA_GEN_3 driver code paths. Nothing different at all from the driver perspective over the GEN3 support. The patch also doesn't elaborate on what products associate to GEN4.

Also of note is that this IRDMA GEN4 enablement patch comes originally from a Google engineer rather than Intel engineering.

The Intel IRDMA GEN4 support landed in Linux 7.1 via [3]the RDMA pull . Also included in that pull is adding PCIe TLP emulation support for the NVIDIA-Mellanox MLX5 driver and other improvements.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-IRDMA-Replacement-5.14

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.18-RDMA

[3] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20260420121905.GA2902776@nvidia.com/