Quick Start Guide for Intel® Xeon® Accelerator Engine: Intel® QuickAssist Technology (Intel® QAT)

As the complexity of applications continues to grow, systems need more and more computational resources for workloads, including cryptography and data compression. The drivers and patches offered in this guide assist application developers to take advantage of Intel® QuickAssist Integrated Accelerator, which is offered with platforms based on 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors and  Intel® Xeon®6 Processors.

This guide will enable the initial setup of Intel® QuickAssist Technology (Intel® QAT) on compatible systems. Check if your Intel® Xeon® Processor has the Intel® QAT accelerator active. This information is available on the Product Specifications for Intel® Xeon® Processors under the Advanced Technologies Section.

Note: The Advanced Technologies section lists the "out-of-the-box" Accelerators present on a specific SKU. If the Accelerators are available on your CPU SKU, they will be listed as the number of devices available. For more details, visit: Intel® Accelerator Engines

Installing the Intel® QAT Driver

1. Download the Intel® QAT driver from Intel® QuickAssist Technology Driver for Linux* – HW Version 2.0.
2. Open the terminal and switch to superuser.
3. Create a working directory for the software. This directory can be user-defined, but for the purposes of this document, the following recommendation is provided.

export ICP_ROOT=/QAT
mkdir -p $ICP_R
cd $ICP_ROOT

4. Transfer the tarball to the system in the ICP_ROOT directory, and unpack the tarball using the following command:

tar -zxof QAT20.L.*.tar.gz

5. Prepare the package installation by checking the prerequisites and configuring the build options by running the command below:

./configure

6. Install the driver by running the command below:

make -j install

Checking the Intel® QAT Endpoints are Running

1. Boot the system.
2. Open the terminal.
3. Run the following command to check if the Intel® QAT endpoints are up and running:

service qat_service status

Depending on the Linux distribution, the output may be different:

• In Ubuntu*, you should see an output similar to the following. Note that the service status should be loaded and active:

• In other Linux distributions like CentOS* or Fedora*, the output should look like the following:

# service qat_service status
Checking status of all devices.
There is 2 QAT acceleration device(s) in the system:
qat_dev0 - type: 4xxx,  inst_id: 0,  node_id: 0,  bsf: 0000:76:00.0,  #accel: 1 #engines: 9 state: up
qat_dev1 - type: 4xxx,  inst_id: 1,  node_id: 0,  bsf: 0000:7a:00.0,  #accel: 1 #engines: 9 state: up

4. If the Intel® QAT endpoints are not up, run the command below to restart the service and check again for its status:

service qat_service restart
service qat_service status

Running the Intel® QAT Sample Application

1. Open a terminal and switch to super user (sudo su command)
2. Build the Intel® QAT samples by running the command below:

cd $ICP_ROOT
make samples-install

3. Run the sample application with the following command. If the sample application runs, it means Intel® QAT is working properly, and all the setup is correct.

$ICP_ROOT/build/cpa_sample_code signOfLife=1

The output should look similar to the following: