Intel Prepares Wireless Mode Support For QAT Gen6 Hardware
Last year Intel began preparing their QuickAsist Linux driver support for QAT Gen6 hardware with upcoming platforms. That initial Intel QAT Gen6 driver enablement landed back in Linux 6.16 while for the upcoming Linux 7.1 kernel they are preparing support for a new wireless mode with this next-gen QuickAssist hardware.
QAT Gen6 wireless mode appears to target specific SKUs based upon a fuse bit and then loading a separate firmware binary focused on wireless cryptography standards. QAT GEN5 hardware already supports wireless algorithms like ZUC-128, SNOW3G-UEA2, AES-F8, AES-CMAC-256, and others. With QAT GEN6 there will now be ZUC-256, 5G, extended algorithm chaining, and other additions for accelerating wireless crypto tasks with QuickAssist.
This patch queued in the crypto subsystem explains:
It will be interesting to see what all this wireless SKU ends up incorporating, if any other feature patches for QAT GEN6 end up surfacing.
This wireless mode enablement patch is in the cryptodev Git branch ahead of the Linux 7.1 merge window opening in April.
QAT Gen6 wireless mode appears to target specific SKUs based upon a fuse bit and then loading a separate firmware binary focused on wireless cryptography standards. QAT GEN5 hardware already supports wireless algorithms like ZUC-128, SNOW3G-UEA2, AES-F8, AES-CMAC-256, and others. With QAT GEN6 there will now be ZUC-256, 5G, extended algorithm chaining, and other additions for accelerating wireless crypto tasks with QuickAssist.
This patch queued in the crypto subsystem explains:
"Add wireless mode support for QAT GEN6 devices.
When the WCP_WAT fuse bit is clear, the device operates in wireless cipher mode (wcy_mode). In this mode all accelerator engines load the wireless firmware and service configuration via 'cfg_services' sysfs attribute is restricted to 'sym' only.
The get_accel_cap() function is extended to report wireless-specific capabilities (ZUC, ZUC-256, 5G, extended algorithm chaining) gated by their respective slice-disable fuse bits. The set_ssm_wdtimer() function is updated to configure WCP (wireless cipher) and WAT (wireless authentication) watchdog timers. The adf_gen6_cfg_dev_init() function is updated to use adf_6xxx_is_wcy() to enforce sym-only service selection for WCY devices during initialization."
It will be interesting to see what all this wireless SKU ends up incorporating, if any other feature patches for QAT GEN6 end up surfacing.
This wireless mode enablement patch is in the cryptodev Git branch ahead of the Linux 7.1 merge window opening in April.