Imagination PowerVR Open-Source GPU Driver To Be Introduced In Linux 6.8

It's been well over a decade since many were wanting open-source Imagination PowerVR graphics when their graphics IP was more common among SoCs, but with the Linux 6.8 kernel in early 2024 there will finally be an upstream, open-source PowerVR DRM kernel graphics driver! But before getting your hopes too high, this is the effort that's only around the newer PowerVR graphics and not the prior generation hardware from many years ago.

The past several years now Imagination Tech has been working on an open-source GPU kernel driver for the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem. This open-source PowerVR kernel driver has been happening concurrently to the PowerVR Vulkan driver being developed within Mesa. Imagination has been working on this open-source kernel driver with open Vulkan driver to better their 3D support on Linux. For OpenGL the company is planning on using the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation.

The development of this Imagination DRM driver has been initially focused on the AXE-1-16M GPU and testing with the TI SK-AM62 board. The kernel driver has also been tested with the BeaglePlay board.

The BeaglePlay is a ~$100 development board with a TI AM625 SoC featuring four Cortex-A53 cores, a 400MHz Cortex-M4F, and PowerVR Rogue AXE-1-16M GPU. The board has 2GB of DDR4 memory and 16GB eMMC flash. It's not particularly exciting from a hardware perspective unless wanting to test this open-source PowerVR driver support.

This Imagination PowerVR Rogue GPU kernel driver has been written as open-source from scratch and supports DMA-BUF / PRIME, DRM sync objects, per-context user-space managed virtual address spaces, power management, GPU job submission, GPU hang recovery, and other basics.

The news this Thanksgiving is that after several rounds of review (v9), the patches today were sent via drm-misc-next to DRM-Next. With the PowerVR DRM driver part of this drm-misc-next PR, it's now expected to land for the upcoming Linux 6.8 kernel cycle.

Barring any last minute issues from coming up, the Imagination PowerVR Rogue kernel graphics driver will be in Linux 6.8 for playing along with the Mesa PowerVR Vulkan driver.