While not talked about as much as the likes of the Intel Gaudi accelerators with their upstream Habana Labs kernel driver or the AMD Instinct MI300 series with their open-source upstream support too, back in 2022 Qualcomm did post an open-source kernel driver for their Cloud AI accelerator . That was followed by an open-source compiler and user-space stack and in turn the QAIC driver was upstreamed into the accelerator (accel) subsystem last year with Linux 6.4.

The Qualcomm Cloud AI 100 accelerator cards have this open-source and upstream kernel driver since last year and open-source user-space software available. Making it easier now to run this open-source upstream stack is the Qualcomm Cloud AI 100 series firmware being upstreamed into linux-firmware.git as the de facto repository for all of the Linux firmware/microcode binaries.

As of today with this commit to linux-firmware.git, there are now the Qualcomm AIC100 firmware files in the upstream repository for supporting the Cloud AI 100 series hardware.

Just over 4MB worth of binary blobs for the firmware are needed for jiving with the open-source stack for these Qualcomm Cloud AI accelerators. Nice seeing more open-source and upstream AI accelerator support for Linux.