Intel Vision Processing Unit Patches Updated For The Linux Kernel

As part of Intel's lengthy "Keem Bay" upstreaming for Linux as their latest-generation Movidius VPU offering, now that much of the core infrastructure bits are all mainlined, the latest focus has been on their Vision Processing Unit enablement.

The Intel Vision Processing Unit upstreaming is quite big and includes new xlink-pcie, xlink-ipc, and xlink-core drivers as part of the effort. This VPU was developed through Intel's acquisition of Movidius and can be used for computer vision processing on a locally attached camera or CV processing for a network or tethered camera setup. While most common will be the Keem Bay SoC on a PCI Express card, it can also be found in form factors as a USB dongle or M.2 card as a computer vision accelerator.

At the start of December were the initial Intel VPU patches while they have now been updated from early feedback and other missing items to now form a second version. A mailbox IPC driver has been added and the Keem Bay IPC driver reworked to use that, documentation updates, and new related drivers. The new drivers include an HDDL device manager, TSENS thermal management, Xlink SMBus, and a VPU manager component.

This Intel Vision Processing Unit enablement has now ballooned to nearly 22 thousand lines of code on top of all the existing Keem Bay SoC support upstreamed, compared to the 15 thousand lines for the VPU code in December.

Those interested in Intel's VPU offering can find the Linux kernel driver patches out for review via this mailing list thread.