Advanced Installation On Ubuntu - Prerequisites#

If you want to leverage GPU and/or NPU for inference or use graphics hardware encoding/decoding capabilities, you need to install appropriate drivers. The easiest way is to use the automated script described in the installation guide. The instructions below are intended for performing manual installation.

Prerequisite 1 - Intel® GPU drivers for computing and media runtimes#

To use GPU as an inference device or to use graphics hardware encoding/decoding capabilities, install GPU computing and media runtime drivers. Follow the up-to-date instructions for your hardware:

(Optional) Prerequisite 2 - Install Intel® NPU drivers#

To use NPU (AI accelerator) of Intel® Core™ Ultra processors, you need to install Intel® NPU driver:

  1. First, make sure that the intel_vpu.ko module is enabled on your host:

    user@your-host:~$ lsmod | grep intel_vpu
intel_vpu             245760  0

  2. Installing the driver requires the device to be recognized by your system. The Kernel Mode driver should be available as an accel device in the /dev/dri directory. If it is not there, reboot the host.

    user@my-host:~$ ll /dev/accel/ | grep accel
crw-rw----  1 root render 261, 0   Aug  6 22:41 accel0

  3. Follow the “Installation procedure” for the newest Intel® NPU driver.

NOTE: If you are experiencing issues with the installation, check all notes and tips in the release notes for the newest Intel® NPU driver version. Please pay attention to access to the device as a non-root user.

Note that the following error can occur when running DL Streamer on NPU device:

Setting pipeline to PLAYING ...
New clock: GstSystemClock
Caught SIGSEGV
Spinning.

For a temporary workaround, use the following setting:

export ZE_ENABLE_ALT_DRIVERS=libze_intel_npu.so

The issue should be fixed with newer versions of Intel® NPU drivers and Intel® OpenVINO™ NPU plugins.

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