Linux 7.3 Ready With CXL Type-2 Driver Support For AMD Solarflare NICs

With the mainline Linux 7.2 kernel there is now the basic support in place for CXL Type-2 accelerator drivers within the CXL core subsystem code. The first in-tree Type-2 driver with the Linux kernel is for the new AMD Solarflare NIC hardware.

Yesterday the CXL subsystem updates were merged with the main highlight being the rest of the patches upstreamed for basic Type-2 accelerator driver support:
"This includes the remaining patches to complete the basic support for CXL type2 (accelerators) drivers by the CXL core. A set of unit testing support to catch regressions for the CXL core type2 exported functions has also been added. The actual CXL type 2 driver support for the AMD Solarflare NIC driver has been picked up by net-dev.

A set of preparatory patches has been picked up from the CXL port error handling series in order to reduce the number of patches in that series for review. The rest of that series is getting close to be merged but was not ready for the 7.3 merge window."

Separately via the big networking subsystem pull request for Linux 7.3 was upstreaming that AMD Solarflare driver.


Via the new SFC_CXL Kconfig option, the Compute Express Link support can be enabled for the Solarflare SFC9100-family.


Great seeing this CXL work come together in time for Linux 7.3 with either v7.3 or v7.4 being this year's Linux Long Term Support (LTS) kernel version.