The good news is that Intel tonight posted a pull request for open-source Gaudi 3 accelerator support for the mainline Linux kernel! The bad news is that it’s coming quite late in the product cycle, much later than the former excellent Habana Labs open-source track record, and their hopes of squeezing this code into the Linux 6.19 kernel may be dashed.

Going back to even the pre-Intel acquisition days, the Habana Labs accelerator driver had a good open-source track record. Initially it started off a bit rough until they had open-sourced their user-space bits and ultimately their compiler and other user-space software. But after that they were excellent open-source stewards friendly with the mainline kernel and punctually enabling new hardware support, helping craft the Linux kernel accelerator “accel” subsystem under the Direct Rendering Manager area, etc.