Imagination Tech Rolls Out Latest PowerVR Rogue DRM Kernel Driver Patches

Imagination Technologies today published their fourth iteration of their in-development PowerVR DRM kernel graphics driver targeting their Rogue architecture and future graphics IP. This open-source kernel driver ultimately will go along with their PowerVR Vulkan driver they continue developing within the Mesa code-base.

This from-scratch PowerVR DRM driver continues to be quite promising although limited to Rogue and newer graphics tech... After years of the open-source community desiring open-source PowerVR graphics when their graphics IP was much more common. It was last August that this in-development DRM driver was originally sent out for review while the PVR Mesa Vulkan driver continues to be developed concurrently for user-space. Today marks the fourth iteration of the patches.

With the v4 patches, there is now support for partial render jobs, hang recovery has been implemented via a firmware hard-reset command, threaded IRQ handling, cleaning up resource acquisition, and various other changes to further evolve this driver that aims to eventually go mainline.

The AXE-1-16M GPU with the TI SK-AM62 board continues to be the main testing focus by the Imagination Tech developers. Those interested in the latest work on the open-source PowerVR Linux graphics driver stack can find the v4 patches on dri-devel.