Since late 2024 Intel has been working on 5th Gen NPU support for their Linux IVPU driver. That 5th Gen NPU support for Intel Core Ultra “Panther Lake” SoCs was upstreamed back in Linux 6.13. Now today the Intel Linux NPU user-space driver has seen its official support added for Panther Lake.
The Intel Linux NPU Driver in user-space is what interfaces between the IVPU kernel accelerator driver and user-space applications like the OpenVINO AI toolkit with its Intel NPU back-end support. Today’s Linux NPU Driver v1.28.0 adds Panther Lake support as its main change. Panther Lake is now verified to be working on Linux atop Ubuntu 24.04 LTS with the distribution’s Linux 6.14 based kernel and tested on unspecified Panther Lake hardware. This complements the existing Linux NPU Driver support for Meteor Lake, Arrow Lake, and Lunar Lake.
Ubuntu 24.04 LTS was their only official test target but this Linux NPU Driver should work on other Linux distributions too with Linux 6.13+ for having the necessary kernel driver compatibility.
The timing is good with expecting to hear much more about Panther Lake and hopefully seeing plenty of Panther Lake laptops next month at CES in Las Vegas.
The only other change mentioned in Intel’s Linux NPU Driver 1.28 release is dropping official Ubuntu 22.04 LTS support. Downloads via GitHub.
