Intel Linux NPU driver 1.6 for Meteor Lake, Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake released

Intel engineers on Wednesday released version 1.6 of the Linux NPU driver for this MIT-licensed user-space mode driver that supports the Neural Processing Unit (NPU) found since the Core Ultra Series 1 “Meteor Lake” SoCs and currently supports the upcoming Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake processors. This user-space Intel Linux NPU driver communicates with their iVPU kernel accelerator driver to create a beautiful open-source and upstream NPU software stack on Linux systems.

As for the changes in the v1.6 version of the Intel Linux NPU driver, no changelog has been published for this new version and the commits since the v1.5.1 NPU driver are compressed to just one commit to update their public repository… So this is not exactly user friendly for monitoring changes.

This version of the Intel Linux NPU driver v1.6 has been validated on Intel Meteor Lake and upcoming Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake platforms on Ubuntu Linux with the Linux 6.8 kernel driver. While this NPU driver update switches to using OpenVINO 2024.3 instead of OpenVINO 2024.2 and other minor revisions, there is no precise overview of other changes beyond that.

Those who want the latest Intel user-mode driver support for their NPU will definitely find the code on GitHub, while the kernel driver will continue to be maintained in the mainline tree – this is where AMD is still lagging behind with its Ryzen AI (XDNA) support, as the company continues to work on upstreaming its kernel driver and expanding software support in the user space.