Upstreamed at the start of the year was the [1]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 [2]this patch series from Imagination with the 21 patches adding around 800 lines of new code for enabling the .



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.8-DRM

[2] https://lore.kernel.org/dri-devel/20241105-sets-bxs-4-64-patch-v1-v1-0-4ed30e865892@imgtec.com/