Merged recently for the Linux 6.16 kernel was initial support for Intel QAT Gen6 hardware. A new qat_6xxx driver was added for supporting the next-gen QuickAssist Technology accelerator IP being found with upcoming Intel Xeon processors. Patches being prepared now for the Linux 6.17 kernel are building out a new decompression service for that next-generation hardware.
Existing Intel QAT hardware and driver support have a compression service for providing both accelerated compression and decompression. But new to the Intel QAT Gen6 is now introducing a dedicated “decompression” service to optimize the accelerator for just decompression tasks.
The QAT Linux driver code has the notion of being able to adapt the QAT accelerators for different “services” whether it be symmetric cryptographic operations, asymmetric cryptographic operations, compression and decompression, and compression/decompression with chaining. But new for the upcoming hardware with the qat_6xxx driver is a dedicated “decomp” mode for catering the QuickAssist usage just for decompression operations. Presumably this decompression mode will yield better performance/efficiency than tunning QAT in the combination compression/decompression mode if you have a Linux server dealing with just a lot of data decompression.
More details on this Intel QAT decompression mode can be found via the qat_6xxx driver patch and the documentation patch.
With this Intel QAT code now queued in the “cryptodev” Git branch, they should be submitted as part of the cryptography subsystem updates for the Linux 6.17 kernel cycle later in the year.
