Intel Quick Assist Technology (QAT) is hardware acceleration for some crypto and compression operations that has the potential to massively speed up certain operations and also offload CPUs of a lot of work. It is somewhat similar to the AES-NI instructions introduced in the past, but some features require library support and a kernel driver rather than just new cpu instructions. This page is currently just a dump of related things, please edit and provide more structure/info if you know of any.
Intel Overview
Intel data compression guide
Intel openssl with QAT guide
Intel use cases
Intel qatlib library (BSD license)
Intel QATZip library (BSD license)
Intel nginx using qat
- kernel driver
release notes for 1.7 (Table 2 explains all the licensing)
- kernel driver is GPLv2, other things are BSD or dual BSD/GPLv2
some pieces appear upstream already
- Intel have made PCIe cards with QAT features
- Newer Intel processors will contain some built-in QAT features
- the firmware-misc-nonfree package currently contains firmware blobs for some QAT devices
- there is a librte-common-qat21 package in Debian that is "DPDK is a set of libraries for fast packet processing."
- currently nothing listed in WNPP
It seems like the licensing would allow at least some parts of this in Debian, but it's not super clear and Intel will probably need to provide assistance to various upstream projects if they want it to happen.