xanderlent/intel-npu-driver

Project ID: 135579

Description

Intel Neural Processing Unit Driver for Linux

This repository provides packages for the Linux user space driver and proprietary firmware for the Intel Neural Processing Unit (NPU) hardware found on Intel Core Ultra (Series 1) and newer (Meteor Lake and newer) Intel processors. It was formerly known as the Intel Movidius Versatile Processing Unit (VPU). The Linux kernel driver is upstream as drivers/accel/ivpu.

Installation Instructions

To use the Intel NPU:

Enable the Copr.
Install the intel-npu-firmware package.
- If the kernel module has already been loaded, you must manually unload and reload it to pick up the new firmware. (According to discussions upstream, using an unmatched firmware and driver version is not supported.)
- If you are using Linux v6.12-rc1 or newer, including stable versions v6.6.55, v6.10.14, and v6.11.3 and newer, or your kernel tree includes upstream commit 58b5618ba80a5e5a8d531a70eae12070e5bd713f (accel/ivpu: Add missing MODULE_FIRMWARE metadata), then dracut should automatically include the ivpu kernel module and associated firmware in your initramfs the next time that it is regenerated. On unpatched kernels, you will need to manually add the firmware to your initramfs.
Install the intel-npu-level-zero package to enable use of the NPU via OneAPI Level Zero.
Optionally install and run the user-mode and kernel-mode driver tests from intel-npu-level-zero-tests.
Optionally install the -debuginfo and -debugsource packages for easier debugging.
Still TODO: The devel parts of this driver; the headers and libraries that are required to build your own code against it.
- Fedora's oneapi-level-zero-devel package provides the common Level Zero headers, but the NPU extension headers are not yet packaged.
Still TODO, possibly in another repo: Programs that acutally use this driver, like Intel's NPU Python library or GIMP Plugin.
Still TODO: This driver can be built with OpenVINO in some kind of tight integration?