Patches were posted this past weekend for enabling the mainline Linux kernel to run on the Tenstorrent Blackwhole SoC of A0 silicon on the Blackhole P100 and P150 PCIe accelerator cards.
The Tenstorrent Blackhole SoC is made up of four RISC-V CPU tiles of four SiFive X280 cores. Each time in turn can run an instance of Linux.
Tenstorrent maintains a “Linux on Blackhole” project for letting users boot Linux on the Blackhole PCIe cards. Compared to the downstream project from Tenstorrent, these patches being proposed for the upstream Linux kernel aren’t as comprehensive yet.
Drew Fustini who posted these Blackhole enablement patches for the Linux kernel explained with the patch series:
“The goal for upstreaming this rather minimal device tree in this series is to make it possible to boot mainline kernel builds. I attended the recent KernelCI workshop, and there are not currently many RISC-V boards doing boot tests. I think the Blackhole cards could help improve the situation once Blackhole is able to boot important trees like mainline and next. The HVC SBI console is sufficient for boot testing.”
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. More details on these products at Tenstorrent.com.
We’ll see where this effort leads for enabling the upstream Linux kernel to begin booting on the Tenstorrent hardware.
