Intel Meteor Lake VPU Accelerator Support Ready For Linux 6.3

Among the numerous exciting aspects of Intel's next-generation Meteor Lake client processors is the introduction of the Versatile Processing Unit (VPU) inference accelerator for Computer Vision (CV) and Deep Learning (DL) workloads.

Going back to last summer Intel engineers working on the Linux support have been posting open-source driver code for the Intel VPU (not to be confused with a Vision Processing Unit or Video Processing Unit...) being introduced with Meteor Lake. That driver was also adapted for Linux's new compute accelerator "accel" framework/subsystem. That driver is now ready to be upstreamed for Linux 6.3 and this "iVPU" addition will serve as the first driver within the accelerator subsystem.

Sent out on Tuesday was this drm-misc-next pull request of new material going into DRM-Next ahead of February's Linux 6.3 merge window. Most significant with that pull is introducing the new Intel VPU accelerator driver.

In addition to the fully open-source kernel driver for the Intel Versatile Processing Unit, Intel already has published their open-source user-space VPU driver code. For then making use of the Intel VPU in the real-world, they also have the compiler and driver support in OpenVINO for taking advantage of this new hardware block with 14th Gen Core processors.

So add the Intel Versatile Processing Unit accelerator driver to the interesting changes coming with Linux 6.3.