AMD Pensando DSC RDMA/RoCE adapters
Provides RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCEv2) acceleration on AMD's Pensando Distributed Services Card (DSC) family of programmable smart NICs/DPUs, including the current DSC3-400. The cards are sold today for cloud and enterprise data centres, and this is the InfiniBand-subsystem companion to the main ionic Ethernet driver.
recommendation
It should stay in the kernel because this is brand-new code: the RDMA half of AMD's Pensando DPU support landed in mainline in September 2025 (kernel 6.18) and was still receiving bug fixes into early 2026. AMD actively sells the underlying DSC/DSC3 hardware, so this is the upstream path for current customers running RoCE workloads on those smart NICs.
repository signals
sources
- patch.msgid.link
Initial upstream RDMA/ionic enablement landed in September 2025 as a multi-patch series for the AMD Pensando/Ionic adapter.
- patch.msgid.link
The driver was still receiving functional bug fixes in February 2026, including a stable-tagged fix for incorrect source MAC handling.
- amd.com
AMD was actively marketing Pensando DPU technology in 2026, indicating the hardware family remains current rather than legacy-only.
- amd.com
AMD's DSC3-400 product brief advertises RDMA/RoCEv2 capabilities on current-generation Pensando hardware.
- cateee.net
LKDDb shows CONFIG_INFINIBAND_IONIC present in mainline kernels starting with 6.18, confirming this is a new in-tree driver rather than a legacy holdover.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Directory inspection via shell showed a real auxiliary RDMA driver (Kconfig names AMD Pensando DSC RDMA/RoCE Support; module ionic_rdma). Local git log/show via shell established first merge in Sep 2025 and a substantive fix in Feb 2026, both carrying patch.msgid links cited above. Web search was used for lore/removal reconnaissance and product-status evidence; it surfaced current AMD Pensando product pages and no obvious removal/deprecation thread. Because the driver is new, actively maintained, and targets hardware AMD still markets, removal/deprecation is not justified; there is no same-hardware replacement upstream beyond the required companion net driver ionic.