For two years now the Intel IVPU accelerator driver has been part of the mainline kernel for supporting the Neural Processing Unit (NPU) that’s part of the Core Ultra “Meteor Lake” CPUs and newer. Only this week though was the firmware for the Intel NPUs now upstreamed to the linux-firmware.git repository.
In making it easier to get the NPU working on Intel Core Ultra SoCs under Linux, linux-firmware.git has added the Intel NPU firmware binaries to provide for a nice out-of-the-box experience with all Linux distributions pulling from this repository for device firmware/microcode files.
The push to linux-firmware.git on Friday adds the firmware files for Intel 37xx and 40xx NPUs that correlate to existing Meteor Lake, Arrow Lake, and Lunar Lake platforms.
The Intel license on these firmware binaries is under a standard redistribution license for firmware binaries. It’s around 2~2.5MB per NPU for the firmware binary if you were wondering its size.
This commit is what lands the initial Intel NPU firmware files.
