Intel NPU Accelerator Driver Readies "Turbo Mode" For Better Performance
Sent out today was the latest weekly batch of drm-misc-next changes for consisting of various Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) core updates as well as changes to the smaller display/graphics kernel drivers plus the growing work around accelerator "accel" drivers within the kernel. Intel NPU accelerator driver changes stand out for this week's pull request ahead of Linux 6.17.
Today's drm-misc-next pull of new material slated for Linux 6.17 includes some DRM core fixes, adding task information to the DRM wedge API, improved MIPI-DSI support for the Renesas RZ-DU driver, fence improvements for the VMware VMWGFX driver, and other changes.
The task information for GPU wedge events is interesting for knowing the PID of the client that triggered the GPU reset and being able to present nice user-friendly notifications around apps causing GPU issues. For more background information on this see Linux's New Way Of Informing User-Space Over Hung GPUs May Become More Useful and builds off the functionality merged earlier this year of a standardized way of informing user-space over hung/reset GPUs.
For the Intel NPU "IVPU" accelerator driver within this pull request there is accelerator support for Wildcat Lake. The Intel NPU with Wildcat Lake is basically identical to what's found with the upcoming Panther Lake SoCs and so it just comes down to a new device ID being needed.
The other notable new Intel NPU driver addition for Linux 6.17 is adding a new "turbo" flag for submissions to the neural processing unit. With the new "turbo" flag for the DRM_IVPU_CMDQ_CREATE ioctl, submitted jobs can be marked as turbo for running with the NPU at higher frequencies. For demanding AI workloads on the NPU this can enhance the performance albeit with increased power use.
Setting DRM_IVPU_CMDQ_FLAG_TURBO will allow for leveraging the NPU's low-latency mode for the command queue to maximize performance. Intel's NPU Library has already been prepping for this "turbo" mode. The patches do not provide any estimate for the relative performance impact from this turbo mode or how much of a clock speed difference is expected out of this mode for the NPU.
Those are the interesting changes with today's drm-misc-next pull request.
Today's drm-misc-next pull of new material slated for Linux 6.17 includes some DRM core fixes, adding task information to the DRM wedge API, improved MIPI-DSI support for the Renesas RZ-DU driver, fence improvements for the VMware VMWGFX driver, and other changes.
The task information for GPU wedge events is interesting for knowing the PID of the client that triggered the GPU reset and being able to present nice user-friendly notifications around apps causing GPU issues. For more background information on this see Linux's New Way Of Informing User-Space Over Hung GPUs May Become More Useful and builds off the functionality merged earlier this year of a standardized way of informing user-space over hung/reset GPUs.
For the Intel NPU "IVPU" accelerator driver within this pull request there is accelerator support for Wildcat Lake. The Intel NPU with Wildcat Lake is basically identical to what's found with the upcoming Panther Lake SoCs and so it just comes down to a new device ID being needed.
The other notable new Intel NPU driver addition for Linux 6.17 is adding a new "turbo" flag for submissions to the neural processing unit. With the new "turbo" flag for the DRM_IVPU_CMDQ_CREATE ioctl, submitted jobs can be marked as turbo for running with the NPU at higher frequencies. For demanding AI workloads on the NPU this can enhance the performance albeit with increased power use.
Setting DRM_IVPU_CMDQ_FLAG_TURBO will allow for leveraging the NPU's low-latency mode for the command queue to maximize performance. Intel's NPU Library has already been prepping for this "turbo" mode. The patches do not provide any estimate for the relative performance impact from this turbo mode or how much of a clock speed difference is expected out of this mode for the NPU.
Those are the interesting changes with today's drm-misc-next pull request.