Hi all,
I was recently approached by Intel engineers Miguel and Jair (Cc:ed on
this mail). They asked for my help in getting Debian Bookworm and
higher to support the Data Streaming Accelerator, and we have
exchanged a couple of messages about this. I'm reproducing next part
of our conversation.
The purpose of this mail is to help find interested people in Debian
that can help review and sponsor uploads of the userspace tools; the
kernel-side modules have been enabled as of bug #1021337 (thanks for
the quick reply!)
It is quite probable Miguel and Jair can be the package maintainers,
and I'd be more than happy to welcome them in Debian, but they will
surely need some guidance to get the package (for which the work is
already started¹) in a state that can be uploaded to Debian. I've been
meaning to start helping them, but am quite time-strained and have
been unable to do so, so... anybody interested in getting this
technology supported in our distribution will be a good candidate to
help!
¹ The proposed debian/control file can be found at
https://github.com/intel/idxd-config/blob/stable/debian/control
I asked them for a description of Intel DSA. They say that:
The driver enables the Data Streaming Accelerator or DSA
capability for the 4th generation of the Intel Scalable Xeon
processor family, with code name Sapphire Rapids, and for future
Intel processors.
As stated in the DSA specification (which can be found at
https://software.intel.com/en-us/download/intel-data-streaming-accelerator-preliminary-architecture-specification
):
Intel DSA is a high-performance data copy and transformation
accelerator that will be integrated in future Intel® processors,
targeted for optimizing streaming data movement and transformation
operations common with applications for high-performance storage,
networking, persistent memory, and various data processing
applications.
Intel DSA replaces Intel® QuickData Technology, which is a part of
Intel® I/O Acceleration Technology.
I was also pointed at this very clear blog post in Intel Open Source's
space:
https://01.org/blogs/2019/introducing-intel-data-streaming-accelerator
The userspace software is already available in Fedora / CentOS / RHEL
under the name "accel-config" and "libaccel-config". They propose the
following description:
Utility for configuring the DSA subsystem
Intel Accelerator Utilities (accel-config) provides a user
interface to the Intel Data Streaming Accelerator (DSA). DSA is a
high-performance data copy and transformation accelerator
integrated into Intel Xeon processors. . This package contains a
utility for configuring the DSA (Data Stream Accelerator)
subsystem in the Linux kernel.
The first processor family to support the capability is Intel's fourth
generation of Scalable Xeon server processors, code-named Sapphire
Rapids. Currently some SPR products are planned to be launched on 2022
calendar week 42 and 2022 calendar week 45. High volume SPR processors
have a planned launch window on 2023 calendar week 6 to 9 (Feb. 6,
2023 to March 3, 2023).
The document at
https://01.org/blogs/2019/introducing-intel-data-streaming-accelerator
is a good introduction to the accelerator feature.
From it, we can extract additional details about the accel-config
tool's architecture and features:
accel-config is a utility that allows system administrators to
configure groups, work queues and engines. The utility parses the
topology and capabilities exposed via sysfs and provides a command
line interface to configure resources. Some of the capabilities of the
accel-config are listed below:
> Display the device hierarchy.
> Configure attributes and provide access for kernel or applications.
> Use API library (libaccel) that applications can link to to perform
> operations through a standard ‘C’ library.
> Control devices to stop, start interfaces.
> Create VFIO mediated devices to expose virtual Intel® DSA instances
> to Guest OSes.
So... Is anybody among debian-devel readers interested in helping
Debian support this hardware feature? Extra points for people that
_have_ the suitable hardware! (I don't)
Greetings,
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