There’s another setback to the open-source driver code around Intel’s Gaudi accelerator support on Linux.
At the end of November Intel finally posted the Habana Labs accelerator driver code for Gaudi 3 as open-source for upstreaming to the Linux kernel. This open-source Gaudi 3 support was long delayed and suffered from multiple setbacks at Intel in going through several rounds of driver maintainers due to layoffs and departures. That Gaudi 3 kernel driver support was posted too late for merging to Linux 6.19 and thus now will have to target the Linux 6.20~7.0 kernel. But there is another setback: it turns out Intel is no longer maintaining their open-source user-space driver software around Gaudi.
It turns out earlier this year Intel archived the SynapseAI Core open-source code and is no longer maintained by Intel. The open-source Synapse AI Core GitHub repository was archived in February and README updated with:
PROJECT NOT UNDER ACTIVE MANAGEMENT
This project will no longer be maintained by Intel.
Intel has ceased development and contributions including, but not limited to, maintenance, bug fixes, new releases, or updates, to this project.Intel no longer accepts patches to this project.
If you have an ongoing need to use this project, are interested in independently developing it, or would like to maintain patches for the open source software community, please create your own fork of this project.
SynapseAI Core provides a library for the user-space APIs around Gaudi hardware, the Synapse Backend needed for executing code on Habana Gaudi and the thunk user-space libraries, and other elements. This is the open-source user-space code for software to actually the Gaudi accelerators and the upstream kernel driver.
The SynapseAI Core code was open-sourced several years ago. Back in the pre-Intel-acquisition days, Habana open-sourced a basic library as needed for exercising the kernel driver functionality as a mandate for getting kernel drivers upstreamed in Linux. Now with SynapseAI Core no longer being maintained as an open-source project. it jeopardizes the kernel accelerator driver’s future.
This matter of the open-source user-space code being archived was brought up today on the LKML as well as noting that the Gaudi 3 support was never upstreamed prior to the code being archived. So this could potentially pose an obstacle for finally seeing that Gaudi 3 support added to the next Linux kernel cycle if in fact no open-source user-space support is out there for the Gaudi 3 accelerators.
We’ll see how this situation plays out. Given Intel’s cost cuttings and engineering layoffs/departures, they presumably didn’t want to continue maintaining this open-source code since they also have closed-source Gaudi software as well and with Gaudi 3 at the end of the product line presumably they are just trying to sunset the software support.
