Imagination PowerVR DRM Open-Source Driver Continues To Be Improved Upon

While Imagination continues bringing-up their PowerVR Vulkan driver within Mesa, when it comes to their open-source Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel driver it for now continues living out-of-tree. On tuesday though marked their third version of the PowerVR kernel driver being published.

This Imagination PowerVR DRM kernel driver continues to be engineered for supporting their Rogue graphics architecture and newer. This driver has been working on supporting modern DRM driver features like DMA-BUF and PRIME, DRM sync objects, and other features while also working to support the PVR Mesa Vulkan driver. Most of Imagination's testing with this kernel driver so far has been around the GX6250, AXE-1-16M and BXS-4-64 GPUs.

With the v3 code drop, the PowerVR DRM driver makes use of the DRM_SCHED scheduler, hooks into the GPU virtual address (VA) manager, now supports run-time power management, GPU watchdog and device loss handling, and uses drm_gem_shmem shared memory.

The Imagination DRM kernel driver in its current form is up to 33.6k lines of code. More details on the PowerVR DRM driver v3 via this patch series.