libzeintelnpu.so is the userspace Level Zero plugin that the oneAPI Level Zero loader dlopens to talk to Intel NPU (VPU) hardware on Meteor Lake, Arrow Lake, Lunar Lake, Panther Lake and Wildcat Lake CPUs through the in-tree intel_vpu Linux kernel module (/dev/accel/accel*).

This package only ships the userspace driver. To actually run OpenVINO inference on NPU, two further pieces are required at runtime: * libnpudrivercompiler.so — packaged separately as intel-driver-compiler-npu (forthcoming). * Firmware blobs at /lib/firmware/intel/vpu/*.bin — loaded by the kernel itself, so they cannot live inside a conda environment. Install them system-wide (linux-firmware, or the intel-fw-npu .deb from intel/linux-npu-driver releases on Ubuntu).