Qualcomm Posts QPaCE Linux Driver Code For Faster ZRAM On Newest SoCs

Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 "Hawi" SoC features the Qualcomm Page Compression Engine "QPaCE" hardware accelerator. Linux patches posted recently provide a QPaCE driver for accelerating page compression and decompression for the ZRAM block device. The patches introducing QPaCE Linux support note that this hardware block is found on new Qualcomm SoCs. At least with the patches so far, it's only added to the Device Tree for the Hawi SoC, which is the new Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6. For Linux's ZRAM as a compressed block device in physical RAM such as for compressed swap, QPaCE has the ability to provide for low-latency and faster compression and decompression performance. The initial QPaCE Linux driver work is focused on the engine's "urgent" synchronous path for low-latency single page operations. The hardware is also capable of ring-based asynchronous operation for high throughput patched compression, but that isn't implemented by the initial Linux driver. With the proposed patches, a new "qpace-lz4" Zcomp back-end is introduced for compression/decompression using this hardware. Those interested can learn more about this QPaCE Linux driver in development via this patch series.