Last night Intel finally posted their Gaudi 3 accelerator open-source driver support for the mainline Linux kernel with hopes of getting that long-delayed AI accelerator support into the in-development Linux 6.19 kernel. But as I pointed out, the pull request was coming unusually late for being such a large set of patches and would face an uphill battle to make it for the Linux 6.19 merge window. Sure enough, the pull request was already rejected and withdrawn from being v6.19 material.
Overnight the Intel Gaudi 3 ambitions for Linux 6.19 already ended just hours after the code finally appeared in a pull request. Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) lead maintainer David Airlie of Red Hat who also oversees the accelerator “accel” area commented that the pull request was late. But beyond being late, in his preliminary look at the new code he also found “a few messy bits on initial review.”
Given some messy code and being so late, he already postponed plans for pulling it until Linux 6.20. Or what will likely be known as Linux 7.0 with Linus Torvalds typically incrementing to the next major version number after X.19.
Following Airlie’s comments was then a message from Intel engineer Konstantin Sinyuk formally withdrawing their Linux 6.19 plans:
“Thank you for the detailed prompt review and for catching these issues early.
I am formally withdrawing this pull request to carefully rework the changes and retarget for v6.20.
…
The Gaudi3 support represents ~300K lines, but that’s no excuse for not properly synchronizing with upstream. We’ll get this right for v6.20.”
The Linux 6.19 stable release will be out in February followed by the opening then of the Linux 6.20~7.0 kernel merge window. Linux 6.20~7.0 stable in turn will be out around May with hopefully this Gaudi 3 support in tow for this AI hardware that launched back in September 2024.
