AMD Updates UALink Patches To Get The Linux Kernel Ready For UALoE On Helios

Earlier this month AMD posted a massive set of patches for bringing up UALink support for the mainline Linux kernel and wiring it up into the AMDGPU kernel driver. In closing out the month of August, they have updated this big set of Ultra Accelerator Link patches. UALink is the open standard for a high speed networking protocol for connecting GPUs and other AI accelerators within scale-up pods. For AMD's immediate needs, this bring-up effort is focused on getting UALink over Ethernet "UALoE" all ready to go for their new Helios servers build around the Instinct MI455X and 6th Gen AMD EPYC "Venice" processors and Pensando AI NICs. The updated UALink Linux patches fix 32-bit kernel builds. They also have decided to drop their UALink sysfs-based configuration API. Instead they are going to opt for out-of-band tooling at least initially for handling the UALink configuration handling. There are the 95 patches for the v2 series with that initial UALink infrastructure followed by the series 2 v2 patches were also posted with updated documentation. These UALink patches are too late for making it into the Linux v7.3 cycle but perhaps it will all be ready to go for the mainline kernel with Linux v7.4. For the AMD Helios servers in the near-term, they are presumably relying on patched, blessed Linux distributions but I don't have any confirmed software details to share in that regard at the moment.