The upstream Linux kernel appears largely ready for Intel's next-generation Xeon Diamond Rapids processors as the successor to Granite Rapids . Most of the driver support appears to have been settled for a while with just some stragglers remaining. With the ongoing Linux 7.0 kernel one new addition for Diamond Rapids is NTB driver support.

The NTB driver is for the non-transparent bridge handling for allowing separate memory systems from two or more computers to leverage the same PCI Express fabric. This allows for high speed data transfers and DMA between Xeon platforms using PCIe for cases like distributed storage, compute offloading, high availability clusters, and more.

To the existing Intel NTB hardware driver is now having Intel Gen6 NTB support in place for Diamond Rapids. Just a few dozen lines of new code is needed to the Intel NTB driver for the Diamond Rapids device IDs as well as adjusting the PPD0 offset. It's with Xeon Diamond Rapids where Intel is introducing PCI Express 6.0 connectivity.

The NTB pull for Linux 7.0 also includes some DebugFS improvements, a new "tx_memcpy_offload" module parameter, and other minor refinements.