Intel Preps Nice NPU Driver Improvements For Linux 6.14

For those with an Intel Core Ultra system bearing the company's Neural Processing Unit (NPU), some nice driver enhancements are on the way for the upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel cycle.

Sent out on Tuesday were a set of feature patches to the Intel IVPU accelerator driver that is for supporting the Intel NPU hardware under Linux.

Notable features for the Intel NPU coming in Linux 6.14 include enabling its hardware scheduling "HWS" by default, adding memory utilization reporting, MMU optimizations, and other improvements. For the past number of months the open-source IVPU driver has been working on the hardware scheduling support that may help with performance and for Linux 6.14 it's now in good shape for enabling by default. This hardware scheduling is enabled by default for all Intel NPU hardware generations.

The Intel NPU memory utilization is being exposed via a new sysfs node for showing the total memory used by the NPU both for the firmware and runtime workloads. Under sysfs it's the "npu_memory_utilization" file.

The IVPU driver can also now handle NPU platform detection for pre-silicon environments. The driver is checking a status register now for determining the platform type of whether the NPU is actual silicon, simics, FPGA, or hybrid SLE.

The full list of Intel NPU driver patches slated for the upcoming Linux 6.14 cycle can be found via the dri-devel mailing list.