It was just one month ago that open-source developer Tomeu Vizoso was [1]beginning work on reverse-engineering and writing a Rockchip NPU driver following his work on the Vivante NPU IP open-source driver support. He quickly began seeing [2]the driver working and with very viable performance and now today he's shared another update on this Rockchip open-source NPU driver effort.

Vizoso has managed to enable real-time object detection using the NPU on the Rockchip RK3588 SoC with around 30 FPS performance using the SSSDLite MobileDet model.

Now that real-time object detection is working and the Rockchip open-source driver proving useful, next he's going to be focusing on writing a replacement kernel driver. The open-source kernel driver will be designed from the start to be suitable for upstreaming into the mainline Linux kernel as part of the "accel" accelerator subsystem.

In his [3]blog post he notes there is still a lot of work remaining but work on this Rockchip open-source NPU effort is advancing quickly.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Open-Source-NPU-Rockchip-Starts

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Rockchip-NPU-Early-Success

[3] https://blog.tomeuvizoso.net/2024/04/rockchip-npu-update-3-real-time-object.html