Ensuring that Intel® QuickAssist Technology stack is working correctly on RHEL

Updated -

Environment

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10

Intel® QuickAssist Technology Library (QATlib) contains user space libraries that allow access for Intel® QAT devices. The libraries also expose Intel® QAT APIs and sample code. To get QATlib up and running:

  1. Create the qat user group.

    Raw
    $ sudo groupadd qat

  2. Add your user to the qat group to use QATlib functionalities as non-root user.

    Raw
    $ sudo usermod -a -G qat <YOUR_USER>

  3. Set the maximum amount of locked memory for your user to 200MB.

    Raw
    # echo `whoami` - memlock 200000 >> /etc/security/limits.conf

  4. Add the intel_iommu=on parameter to the kernel command-line.

    Raw
    $ sudo grubby --update-kernel=ALL --args="intel_iommu=on"

  5. Make sure you have the needed firmware files qat_4xxx.bin and qat_4xxx_mmp.bin. We already ship these with the linux-firmware package since versions 20230404-114.git2e92a49f.el8_8 or 20230310-133.el9_2. It is sufficient to just update this package and reboot if needed.

  6. If the driver did not load automatically after reboot, load it manually.

    Raw
    $ modprobe qat_4xxx

    Verify that the qat_4xxx firmware was loaded correctly.

    Raw
    $ dmesg -i -e | grep qat_4xxx

  7. Enable and start the qat service and verify the service is running correctly.

    Raw
    $ sudo systemctl enable --now qat
$ systemctl is-enabled qat && systemctl is-active qat
enabled
active

Additional configuration and fine-tuning

It may be necessary to reconfigure QAT device(s) with the following (unsupported, unshipped) Intel script used to control the qatlib stack:

https://intel.github.io/quickassist/_downloads/74bdfa2cd6bb4987b51a4f550d8f26ba/qat

mentioned in the following Intel documentation:

https://intel.github.io/quickassist/qatlib/configuration.html

and follow this configuration guide in general. This can be necessary due to the following error (zero engines are configured for de/compression):

Raw
[error] cpaDcGetInstances() - : Invalid API Param - numInstances is 0

To use the above script, download the script and run:

Raw
dnf install -y python3 python3-prettytable python3-packaging
### OR (if python3-prettytable or python3-packaging are not available)
dnf install -y python3 python3-pip
pip3 install prettytable packaging

python3 qat --status
python3 qat --config
python3 qat --status

Additional resources about utilities from the QAT ecosystem:

For more information about installing QATlib, see the GitHub qatlib/INSTALL page.
For more information about the QATlib technology in general, see Intel® QuickAssist Technology Library (QATlib).
For introduction and description of the QAT OpenSSL Engine, see Intel® QuickAssist Technology(QAT) OpenSSL* Engine.
For introduction and description of the QATzip library, see Intel® QuickAssist Technology (QAT) QATzip Library.
For list if supported devices, see Supported Devices.
Intel QAT Configuration and Tuning Guide.

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