Intel Accelerators User Library for Go

The project is aimed to develop Go library of IAA/DSA to empower cloud native industry. IAA/DSA is introduced by 4th Gen Intel(R) Xeon(R) Scalable Processor which was launched on Jan'23.

• Intel Accelerators User Library for Go
  • Supported Hardware Accelerator Features
  • Advantages
• How to use
  • Installation
  • Quick Start
    • Example1: Compress/Decompress
    • Example2: CRC Calculation
    • Example3: Data Copy
• Documentation
• FAQ
  • Why is the compression API not the same as compress/flate or compress/gzip?
  • Why I got a "no DSA device detected" or "no hardware device detected" error?

Supported Hardware Accelerator Features

• Compression/Decompression
  • Deflate
  • Gzip
• CRC calculation
• Data Filter (Bitpack / RLE format / Int Array):
  • Expand
  • Select
  • Scan
  • Extract
• Data Move

Advantages

The library is designed to be a lightweight pure Go language implementation with zero dependencies.

• Lower barriers to use for users, no need to install dependency libraries in advance.
• No CGO performance overhead.
• Easy to learn and start.

How to use

Installation

Use the following commands to add ixl-go as a dependency to your existing Go project.

go get github.com/intel/ixl-go

Quick Start

To use the accelerated functions you need IAA or DSA devices on your machine.

You can use Ready function to check if the devices are OK for ixl-go.

Notice:

we don't support non-svm environment for now.

We only support workqueues which enabled block_on_fault and SVM.

If you don't know about how to config IAA/DSA workqueues, you can follow this simple recipe.

Example1: Compress/Decompress

package main

import (
	"bytes"
	"flag"
	"io"
	"log"
	"os"

	"github.com/intel/ixl-go/compress"
)

var f = flag.String("f", "", "file to compress")

func main() {
	flag.Parse()
	if !compress.Ready() {
		log.Fatalln("IAA workqueue not found")
		return
	}
	if *f == "" {
		log.Fatalln("must give a file to compress")
	}

	gzipExample(*f)
	deflateExample(*f)
}

// gzip example:
func gzipExample(filename string) {
	file, err := os.Open(filename)
	if err != nil {
		log.Fatalln("open file failed:", err)
	}
	defer file.Close()

	output, err := os.Create(filename + ".gz")
	if err != nil {
		log.Fatalln("create file failed:", err)
	}
	defer output.Close()

	w := compress.NewGzip(output)
	w.ReadFrom(file)
	w.Close()
}

// deflate example:
func deflateExample(filename string) {
	file, err := os.Open(filename)
	if err != nil {
		log.Fatalln("open file failed:", err)
	}
	defer file.Close()

	buf := bytes.NewBuffer(nil)
	d, err := compress.NewDeflate(buf)
	if err != nil {
		log.Fatalln("NewDeflate failed:", err)
	}
	d.ReadFrom(file)
	d.Close()

	inflateExample(buf)
}

// inflate example:
func inflateExample(r io.Reader) {
	i, err := compress.NewInflate(r)
	if err != nil {
		log.Fatalln("NewInflate failed:", err)
	}
	block := make([]byte, 1024)
	for {
		_, err := i.Read(block)
		if err != nil {
			if err != io.EOF {
				log.Fatalln("error:", err)
			}
			break
		}
	}
}

Example2: CRC Calculation

c, err := crc.NewCalculator()
if err != nil{
	return err
}
result, err := c.CheckSum64(data, crc64.ISO)

Example3: Data Copy

datamove.Copy(output, input)

Documentation

FAQ

Why is the compression API not the same as compress/flate or compress/gzip?

There are several reasons for this:

1. flate and gzip packages provide a parameter called level to tune the compression speed. IAA compression is different from software, it doesn't have a tuning "button" to set the compression level.

2. Compress.Deflate does not implement an io.Writer interface, instead it provides a ReadFrom method. The main reason is that ReadFrom does not need to copy the data everytime and maintain a 64k+ buffer. If you want an io.Writer, you can wrap it using the compress.BufWriter:

    d, err := compress.NewDeflate(underWriter)
    if err != nil {
    	log.Fatalln("NewDeflate failed:", err)
    }
    w := compress.NewWriter(d)
    // or using new API
    w = compress.NewDeflateWriter(underWriter)
   
   

   Be aware of the data copy overhead and the memory overhead.

Why I got a "no DSA device detected" or "no hardware device detected" error?

First, please check your CPU platform, make sure you have IAA or DSA devices.

ls -df /sys/bus/dsa/devices/dsa* # lists all DSA devices if present. Only <path>/dsa<id> are devices.
ls -df /sys/bus/dsa/devices/iax* # lists all IAA devices if present.

Then, use the command below to check whether the workqueues have been configured.

accel-config list

And the most common reason for the problem is that the application is not running as root, try again with sudo.

By default, DSA and IAA workqueues must be used under root permission.

If you want to use the hardware under a non-privileged account, for example, grant IAA/wq1.0 permission to your foo account, try this:

sudo setfacl -m u:foo:rw /dev/iax/wq1.0