Google Enabling PowerVR Rogue GX6250 Open-Source Support With The MediaTek MT8173

Building off the PowerVR kernel driver merged in Linux 6.8 and PowerVR Vulkan driver in Mesa 24.0 that are both focused on Imagination's newer PowerVR Rogue architecture, Google engineers are working on enabling open-source driver support for the PowerVR Rogue GX6250 as found within the MediaTek MT8173 SoC.

Google's motivation for getting the PowerVR Rogue GX6250 working with the MediaTek MT8173 is due to their Chromebook interests and a number of devices running on this SoC. With these efforts, it's possible to run the PowerVR Rogue graphics on an open-source driver stack.

Chen-Yu Tsai of Google posted the patches today for enabling the PowerVR Rogue GX6250 support within the MT8173 SoC. Chen-Yo explained in the patch series:

"This series enables the PowerVR GPU found in the MT8173 SoC, found in some Chromebooks.

This version is different from the initial powervr driver submission in that it splits out the GPU glue layer support out of the powervr driver and into a separate clock and power domain driver. The glue code is otherwise the same, and also the same as found in the ChromeOS kernels, with some extra comments and macro names added where possible.
...
The kernel driver successfully probes the hardware and loads the "rogue_4.40.2.51_v1.fw" firmware provided by Imagination Technologies. Userspace was tested with Mesa 24.0.8 from Debian Trixie rebuilt with the powervr vulkan driver enabled."

It's great seeing the open-source PowerVR Rogue driver support beginning to have some use/interest by other parties.

The MT8173 "Kompanio 500" SoC powers the Lenovo 300e, Lenovo S330, Acer R13, and a variety of other Chromebooks. Hopefully these support patches will manage to be upstreamed into the mainline Linux kernel soon.