It looks like the upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel could land initial Tenstorrent vendor support and provide initial support for the Blackhole SoC with the initial Blackhole P100/P150 PCIe accelerator cards.
Last month initial Linux kernel patches were posted for the Tenstorrent Blackhole SoC. The Tenstorrent Blackhole SoC is made up of four RISC-V CPU tiles of four SiFive X280 cores. Each tile in turn can run an instance of Linux. The patches that have been out for public review are working toward mainline kernel support compared to Tenstorrent’s out-of-tree/downstream code they use officially for these Blachole products.
The Tenstorrent Blackhole P100a retails for $999 USD while the Blackhole P150a is currently marketed at $1399 USD for these high-performance RISC-V cores on a PCIe accelerator card geared for AI workloads.
The patches still provide only basic boot support for the Blackhole hardware but look like they will be ready for the upcoming Linux 6.19 cycle. On Sunday, Drew Fustini sent out a pull request that would introduce this initial/basic Tenstorrent Blackhole support in Linux 6.19:
“Please pull these changes which add Tenstorrent as a vendor and enable support for Blackhole.
…
Add Tenstorrent as a vendor and enable support for the Blackhole SoC in Blackhole P100 and P150 PCIe cards. The SoC contains four RISC-V CPU tiles consisting of 4x SiFive X280 cores.There is a virtual UART implemented in OpenSBI firmware that allows a console program on the PCIe host to communicate through shared memory with Linux running on the Blackhole card.”
If all goes well the pull request will be merged to the SoC tree and in turn make it into the Linux 6.19 merge window in December.
