Etnaviv NPU Driver Support Working Well For The NXP i.MX 8M Plus SoC

Open-source developer Tomeu Vizoso who has been working on supporting Vivante NPU IP within the reverse-engineered Etnaviv driver has been much time recently focused on enabling the Vivante NPU found within the NXP i.MX 8M Plus SoC. While not yet upstreamed, he's been successful in this effort and seeing good performance for object detection with this hardware.

Tomeu Vizoso has made immense strides with the Etnaviv NPU driver support this year while thanks to sponsorship from the Ideas on Board consulting firm he's been focused on extending the hardware support to working with the NXP i.MX 8M Plus SoC. Ideas on Board has also been working on mainline camera support for this SoC too, making a powerful combination of open-source support around this SoC for AI object detection type workloads.

Tomeu shared this week that the support for this SoC has reached the "feature complete stage" after dealing with driver changes as a result of this NXP SoC using a newer version of the Vivante NPU IP. As to the performance and plans ahead, he wrote:

"Performance is pretty good already, allowing for detecting objects in video streams at 30 frames per second, so at a similar performance level as the NPU in the Amlogic A311D. Some performance features are left to be implemented, so I think there is still substantial room for improvement.

At current the code is at a very much proof-of-concept state. The next step is cleaning it all up and submitting for review to Mesa3D."

More details for those interested on Tomeu's blog.