The Intel IVPU accelerator driver will be introducing limits on Intel NPU resource usage by non-root user-space programs beginning with the Linux 7.1 kernel.
In order to avoid situations where a single program could occupy all Intel NPU resources and deprive other programs or other users access to the Intel neural processing unit, the IVPU driver is setting default limits for non-root users. Root user-space programs will still be able to occupy all 128 available contexts and 255 doorbells for the Intel NPUs while non-root user-space will be limited to half the resources: 64 contexts and 127 doorbells.
The intent is to avoid situations of single user-space programs monopolizing all available NPU resources, i.e. NPU denial of service by other apps wanting to leverage AI acceleration. Granted, so far aside from OpenVINO I am not aware of any prominent users of Intel NPUs under Linux. It’d be great if there was more robust Intel NPU software support under Linux already but there really is not. At least though for when there is more broad NPU usage under Linux for both Intel NPUs and AMD Ryzen AI NPUs, the IVPU driver is ready to make sure individual apps aren’t stealing all the resources.
The IVPU safeguard was sent in via today’s drm-misc-next pull request of new DRM/accelerator driver changes queuing ahead of next month’s Linux 7.1 merge window.
