Open-Source PowerVR Driver Being Extended For The Imagination BXS-4-64 MC1 GPU

Upstreamed at the start of the year was the Imagination PowerVR open-source DRM kernel driver for newer Imagination Rogue GPUs. That upstream kernel driver is now being extended to cover the Imagination BXS-4-64 MC1 GPU.

The initial PowerVR Direct Rendering Manager driver development was focused on the AXE-1-16M GPU while using the TI SK-AM62 board. This PowerVR driver is being extended to additional GPUs with similar IP and the latest enablement side are patches today for lighting up the Imagination BXS-4-64 MC1.

A set of 21 patches were posted today for enabling the Imagination BXS-4-64 MC1 as the GPU found within the TI AM68 family of SoCs. These new patches have been tested on the TI SK-AM68 board.

The BXS-4-64 MC1 is designed for in-vehicle experiences/UIs on 1080p displays. The BXS-4-64 MC1 is rated for Vulkan 1.3, OpenGL ES 3.x, OpenCL 3.0, and its performance is advertised as 64 FP32 FLOPs/Clock and 128 FP16 FLOPs/Clock.

These kernel patches require the appropriate firmware binary be loaded for the GPU. The user-space side work for Mesa on this GPU is still being tackled. The kernel patches elaborate on that user mode driver support:

"UMD support is still a work in progress. The branch at [3] is nearly feature complete from a Vulkan perspective. We're currently undertaking a significant rework of the compiler to better accommodate this and other Rogue GPUs which means we can't do more comprehensive driver testing at this point. However, we expect to send a Mesa merge request for the initial version of the compiler (capable of passing some of the Vulkan CTS smoke tests) within the next few days, with a fully functional version of the compiler in place by the end of the year."

See this patch series from Imagination with the 21 patches adding around 800 lines of new code for enabling the .