Intel Begins Upstreaming Work For Their Vision Processing Unit On Linux

While Intel engineers over the course of the year began upstreaming various elements of the Keem Bay SoC support, the actual Vision Processing Unit (VPU) enabling hasn't been sent out for review until now. Intel has sent out their initial patches for bringing up the Vision Processing Unit on the open-source Linux kernel.

Intel's Visual Processing Unit that is new to the Keem Bay SoC can be used as a standalone SoC or as a PCI Express vision processing accelerator The Linux kernel work is ultimately about fulfilling both possible uses.

Sending out of the Vision Processing Unit patches has taken longer than the other Keem Bay bits since they went through a "pre-maintainer review" where already the code was reviewed by experienced Intel Linux developers for enforcing kernel standards and other review. Thus that multi-month process is now wrapped up and hopefully this initial round of public patches place the code in better shape than some past early patch series.

The Intel Vision Processing Unit upstreaming with this initial series is just under fifteen thousand lines of new code and introduces the new xlink,-pcie, xlink-ipc, and xlink-core drivers.

This VPU was developed through Intel's acquisition of Movidius. This Vision Processing Unit can be used for computer vision processing on a locally attached camera or CV processing for a network or tethered camera setup. Besides finding the SoC on a PCI Express card it can also be found in form factors as a USB dongle or M.2 card as a computer vision accelerator.

This first round of Intel Vision Processing Unit patches can be found on the kernel mailing list. Further patches are expected soon.