KNOD Brings GPU-Powered In-Kernel Packet Offload to AMD Hardware
Linux patches introduce KNOD, a kernel-driven in-kernel network offload that runs packet processing on AMD GPUs without user-space libraries like ROCm. The kernel manages GPU queues, JIT-compiles per-packet programs, and DMA’s packets directly into GPU memory, enabling XDP and IPsec offloads to run on the GPU with throughput scaling by GPU occupancy rather than CPU cores. Initial work targets AMD RDNA2/GCN hardware with open-source upstream drivers, and there’s discussion of broader GPU support in the future; the work is presented as RFC-style patches on the Linux kernel mailing list with LPC 2025 background available.