News: 0001564595

  ARM Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life (Terry Pratchett, Jingo)

Rockchip NPU Driver "Rocket" Expected By Linux 6.18, Mesa 25.3 Brings User-Space Code

([Linux Kernel] 5 Hours Ago Rockchip NPU)


The open-source, reverse-engineered Rockchip NPU driver "Rocket" developed by Tomeu Vizoso will soon be in the mainline kernel. The Rocket Gallium3D driver was also merged today for Mesa 25.3 in the user-space code for their AI accelerator support.

Tomeu Vizoso for the past year and a half has been working on [1]an open-source Rockchip NPU driver and finally all the bits are ready for going mainline. The kernel accelerator "accel" driver was recently queued into the DRM-Misc-Next code branch. It's in DRM-Misc-Next as of writing and not DRM-Next. Short of an extra late pull request or working it in as part of DRM "fixes", this driver is expected to land for Linux 6.18 kernel and not the Linux v6.17 merge window now underway. We'll see if it tries to get in for v6.17 or not but as it stands now it's just in DRM-Misc-Next.

With the kernel support in DRM-Misc-Next, today the Mesa/Gallium3D code was [2]merged for Mesa 25.3 with the Rocket Gallium3D driver. That NPU-focused driver in Mesa is [3]building off the Gallium3D TEFLON framework . Tomeu explained there with the new Mesa driver code:

"The programming model matches very closely to that of NVIDIA's NVDLA.

Enough is implemented to run SSDLite MobileDet with roughly the same performance as the blob (when running on a single NPU core)."

Tomeu commented on [4]his blog that he wants to extend this driver to supporting other Rockchip SoCs now as well as further performance optimizations. He's also working on some Etnaviv driver improvements for enhancing the Vivante NPU support.



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

[2] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/29698

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Gallium3D-Teflon-Merged

[4] https://blog.tomeuvizoso.net/2025/07/rockchip-npu-update-6-we-are-in-mainline.html


phoronix

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been havin' all these years."
Mulcahey looks at Malone, who shrugs, and then back at Margaret Mary
Malone. He sets out a glass and pours her a triple shot of Rye. The bar is
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drink. She slams the glass down on the bar, gasps, shudders slightly, and
passes out; falling straight back, stiff as a board, saved from sudden contact
with the barroom floor by the ample belly of Seamus Fogerty.
Sometime later, she comes to on the pool table, a jacket under her
head. Her bloodshot eyes fell upon her husband, who says, "And all these
years you've been thinkin' I've been enjoying meself."