After a few Habana Labs driver maintainers left Intel last year and the upstream open-source Habana Labs driver going on rather a hiatus, it looks like Intel software engineers will be returning to work on this upstream Linux kernel driver for supporting the Gaudi AI accelerators.
There hasn’t been much activity around the “habanalabs” AI accelerator driver within the Linux kernel in several months now / a few kernel release cycles, following the departures from Intel last year. There hasn’t been any real upstream Habana Labs driver work for Linux since the middle of last year:
The lack of activity also meant Intel has been late in upstreaming their Gaudi 3 driver support… To date this hasn’t happened yet, contrary to their response to my Q&A last year that it would happen last October. There’s been no Gaudi 3 driver patches made public yet, let alone anything queued in any “-next” branches for being on a pathway to appearing in the mainline kernel. That’s been particularly frustrating to see the lack of upstream Gaudi 3 support yet, especially with Intel deciding not to bring Falcon Shores to market.
But a message from Intel software engineer Yaron Avizrat has indicated that they will be returning to working on the Habana Labs Gaudi AI accelerator driver. Yaron Avizrat wrote on the mailing list:
“Apologies for the long silence — it’s been a challenging period with the Habanalabs-Intel merger, but we’re back and ready to continue contributing.
We’ll be moving forward with our roadmap — upstreaming the latest HabanaLabs driver, including recent changes and full support for the entire GaudiX series.
To support this effort, Koby Elbaz and Konstantin Sinyuk will join me as co-maintainers on a regular basis.”
It’s great to see that they will be returning to contributing upstream and pushing forward with their road-map – including “full support for the entire GaudiX series” which would also mean the elusive Gaudi 3 support.
Hopefully we begin seeing these new Intel-HabanaLabs driver improvements soon for the Linux kernel.