Yunsilicon submits converged Ethernet/RDMA network driver for Linux mainline

Yunsilicon, a Chinese semiconductor startup founded in 2021, has submitted a revised open-source driver to the Linux kernel mailing list for its high-performance networking hardware. The submission follows an initial draft posted last month and represents the company's first attempt to gain mainline kernel support. The driver targets a dual-function PCIe device with PCI vendor ID 0x1f67, providing both standard Ethernet and RDMA capabilities through a modular three-component design.

The patch series consists of fifteen patches organized into three drivers sharing the xsc prefix: a PCI core driver handling physical function binding and resource management, an Ethernet driver implementing standard networking with NAPI and page_pool, and an RDMA driver providing InfiniBand verbs and data paths. The driver has been in development since 2021 and is licensed under GPLv2.

Driver architecture and upstream status

• Shared PCI core (xsc_pci): The base driver binds to the physical PCIe function, manages command and event queues, interrupt vectors, register access, and CQ/QP/SRQ resource pools, then publishes auxiliary devices for upper-layer drivers.
• Ethernet driver (xsc_eth): Implements TX/RX packet paths using NAPI and page_pool, with support for RSS, checksum offloads, and statistics, binding to the auxiliary device rather than driving PCI directly.
• RDMA driver (xsc_ib): Registers as an ib_device and provides PD/MR, CQ/SRQ/AH, and QP verbs including send/receive data paths, plus RDMA counters and sysfs attributes; it depends on both the core and ethernet drivers for port state and GID information.
• Kconfig options: The three components are selectable via CONFIG_YUNSILICON_XSC_PCI, CONFIG_YUNSILICON_XSC_ETH, and CONFIG_INFINIBAND_XSC.
• Upstream timeline: Development began in 2021 but patches only reached LKML in October 2026, with this second revision representing a significantly cleaned-up submission with proper cover letter.

Why it matters

Mainline support for Yunsilicon adapters would expand the ecosystem of open-source RDMA-capable Ethernet controllers beyond established vendors like Mellanox/NVIDIA, Intel, and Broadcom, giving data center operators and HPC deployers additional hardware choices with guaranteed upstream maintenance. The converged architecture, where Ethernet and RDMA personalities share a single probe and resource set through auxiliary devices, also offers a model that other multi-function NIC vendors may evaluate for their own driver designs.