The upcoming Linux 7.4 kernel will bring mainline support for a new player in the SmartNIC space: Nebula Matrix and its SmartNIC S1000 series. Their in‑house NBL Ethernet driver has been accepted into the networking tree.
Nebula Matrix SmartNIC S1000 overview
Nebula Matrix is a Chinese vendor building SmartNICs and DPUs for data centers. The m18110-NIC / m18000-NIC, marketed as the SNIC S1000 series, targets high‑performance environments such as:
- Cloud computing platforms
- HPC clusters
- General data center workloads
Key hardware specs of the S1000 series include:
- Up to 2×100G Ethernet ports (100GE)
- PCIe Gen4 x16 host interface
- Feature set comparable to other high‑end 100G adapters
Nebula Matrix has been shipping both Windows and Linux drivers, but until now Linux support relied on out‑of‑tree vendor code.
NBL driver and Linux 7.4 integration
The new NBL driver was developed by Nebula Matrix and has gone through the usual upstreaming process. As of last week, it has been merged into net-next, which means it is queued for submission during the Linux 7.4 merge window.
For admins and developers this brings:
- Out‑of‑the‑box support for Nebula Matrix S1000 SmartNICs
- Fewer issues when upgrading kernels, since support is in mainline
- No need to maintain separate vendor driver trees
For embedded and networking engineers working on NFV, custom DPDK stacks, or eBPF-based packet processing, having Nebula Matrix SmartNICs supported directly in the mainline kernel significantly simplifies deployment and long‑term maintenance.
Source: Phoronix
