Via the openSUSE Innovator Initiative, packaging of the Intel Neural Processing Unit (NPU) driver for the openSUSE ecosystem has begun. This is helping to jump-start the Intel NPU support within the openSUSE space although user-space applications ready to leverage the Intel NPU still remains very limited.

The Intel NPU driver support is now available via -- current "experimental" -- packages across openSUSE Tumbleweed, openSUSE Slowroll, openSUSE Leap 15.6, and openSUSE Leap 16.0. This Intel NPU driver is available as the linux-npu-driver . Yes, the name is rather poor considering it's Intel-specific and the "linux-" rather redundant given it's within the confines of openSUSE.

What this openSUSE packaging provides is an RPM of the [1]intel/linux-npu-driver GitHub repository as the Python user-space driver to the Intel NPU support for Core Ultra SoCs (Meteor Lake and newer). Within the mainline Linux kernel is the "IVPU" accelerator driver providing the kernel driver support for the Intel NPUs across Meteor Lake / Lunar Lake / Panther Lake / Wildcat Lake while this new RPM provides the user-space driver component.

Besides needing this "linux-npu-driver" component you also need to have user-space software ready to make use of the NPU. For that Intel's OpenVINO is the main user right now, assuming you build OpenVINO with the NPU back-end included. Beyond that Intel NPU use under Linux remains very limited at the end of 2025.

Those wishing to learn more about the initial Intel NPU driver support for openSUSE can do so via [2]news.opensuse.org .



[1] https://github.com/intel/linux-npu-driver

[2] https://news.opensuse.org/2025/12/02/NPU-arrives-in-os-distributions/