DRM Driver Posted For AI Processing Unit - Initially Focused On Mediatek SoCs

BayLibre developer Alexandre Bailon has posted a "request for comments" of a new open-source Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver for AI Processing Unit (APU) functionality. Initially the driver is catering to Mediatek SoCs with an AI co-processor but this DRM "APU" driver could be adapted to other hardware too.

Alexandre Bailon sums up this DRM AI Processing Unit driver as "a DRM driver that implements communication between the CPU and an APU. This uses VirtIO buffer to exchange messages. For the data, we allocate a GEM object and map it using IOMMU to make it available to the APU. The driver is relatively generic, and should work with any SoC implementing hardware accelerator for AI if they use support remoteproc and VirtIO."

For going along with this DRM kernel driver, BayLibre has also been developing the associated user-space code as open-source over on GitHub.

With this patch series the DRM driver is added to the bindings for the Mediatek MT8183 "Pumpkin" board as the initial user.

The request for comments patch series can be found on dri-devel.