Yunsilicon Working To Upstream Their High Performance Linux Network Driver

Yunsilicon is a Chinese semiconductor startup founded in 2021 that is working on producing high performance networking adapters and DPUs. Over the past month has been their first foray into posting patches to the Linux kernel mailing list and working to get their networking hardware supported by the mainline Linux kernel. Last month they posted an initial draft of their Yunsilicon driver while this week they posted a much more cleaned up version of this open-source driver as well as a proper cover letter for the patch series. Ultimately it's three patches and serving up both Ethernet and RDMA support. The cover letter with this week's patch series explains: "This is a new submission from Yunsilicon to upstream our converged network adapter driver. The hardware is a dual-function PCIe device (PCI vendor 0x1f67) that supports both ethernet and RDMA operations. The series adds three drivers, which share the xsc prefix. A shared PCI core driver binds to the physical function, brings up the command queue, the event queues and the interrupt handling, and publishes one auxiliary device per function. The ethernet and RDMA drivers bind to that auxiliary device instead of driving the PCI function themselves, so the two personalities share a single probe and resource set. 1. xsc_pci - the PCI core driver (CONFIG_YUNSILICON_XSC_PCI). Owns the PCI function, the command queue, the event queues, the interrupt vectors, the register access layer and the CQ/QP/SRQ resource pools. Patches 02-06. 2. xsc_eth - the ethernet driver (CONFIG_YUNSILICON_XSC_ETH). Registers the netdev, implements the TX/RX packet paths with NAPI and page_pool, RSS, checksum offloads and statistics. Patches 07-09, on top of the core. 3. xsc_ib - the RDMA driver (CONFIG_INFINIBAND_XSC). Registers the ib_device and provides the PD/MR, CQ/SRQ/AH and QP verbs including the send/receive data paths, plus RDMA counters and sysfs attributes. Patches 10-15, on top of the core and the ethernet driver (the netdev supplies port state and GID)." The driver is GPLv2 licensed and going off the patches, has been in development since 2021 but only since last month have these patches appeared on the LKML for trying to reach the mainline Linux kernel. Unfortunately the Yunsilicon website seems restrictive with access and so I am unable to pull up other details on their networking gear, but great nevertheless seeing more semi startups working to get open-source driver support into the mainline Linux kernel.