IBM POWER Nest Accelerator (NX) crypto and compression engine
An on-chip coprocessor built into IBM POWER9 and POWER10 server CPUs that offloads symmetric encryption (AES, etc.), hashing, random-number generation, and gzip-style compression and decompression from the main cores. It is used in IBM's enterprise Power Systems servers, including current Power10 models like the S1014.
recommendation
Worth keeping but flagging as a specialist driver, because the hardware only exists in IBM's POWER9 and POWER10 enterprise servers rather than commodity machines. The code is clearly still alive in upstream — Herbert Xu and Eric Biggers were modernising it as recently as April 2025 — and IBM continues to sell Linux-capable Power10 systems new, so removing it would break a small but real customer base.
repository signals
sources
- lore.kernel.org
Recent upstream work touched drivers/crypto/nx in April 2025 ('crypto: nx - Use API partial block handling'), indicating the driver is still maintained rather than abandoned.
- ibm.com
IBM documents Nest accelerators on POWER9 processor-based servers as on-chip accelerators for compression, decompression, encryption, and decryption.
- ibm.com
IBM states Power10 servers, as well as Power9, have an on-chip NX accelerator providing compression, encryption, and random-number functions.
- ibm.com
IBM's Power S1014 product page shows Power10-based servers designed to run Linux are current sale products, supporting that NX-capable Power systems were still sold new in 2025.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
`drivers/crypto/nx` is a real Power-platform crypto/compression accelerator driver (local Kconfig/read of tree). `lore_file_timeline` on `drivers/crypto/nx/nx.c` showed substantial 2025 maintenance traffic from Herbert Xu/Eric Biggers, with no removal signal in the retrieved lore evidence, so this is not a dead driver. Web search surfaced IBM docs confirming NX functionality on POWER9 and POWER10 and a current IBM Linux-capable Power10 product page. Conclusion: hardware remains shipping but only in a niche IBM Power enterprise segment, so keep the driver but annotate it as specialized/low-deployment. Source acquisition: lore URL from `lore_file_timeline`; IBM URLs from `web.search_query` results.