Imagination’s open-source PowerVR kernel graphics driver for a while has seen patches extending it to work on RISC-V given that some RISC-V hardware coming to market has featured PowerVR graphics IP. With the upcoming Linux 6.18 kernel that work is landing along with enabling support for the T-HEAD TH1520’s GPU.
Sent out this week to DRM-Next by way of drm-misc-next are the PowerVR Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver patches adding RISC-V architecture support and specifically enabling the TH1520 GPU support.
The Alibaba T-HEAD TH1520 is a quad-core Xuantie C910 RISC-V processor paired with Imagination BXM-4-64 PowerVR graphics. The TH1520 has been supported by the mainline Linux kernel and this SoC has begun appearing on a few different RISC-V single board computers, but only with Linux 6.18 will there be this upstream GPU support. This also builds atop the power sequencing driver in Linux 6.17 that was upstreamed since there is a complex clock and reset sequence needed for actually powering on the Imagination BXM GPU for this particular SoC.
So for Linux 6.18 the Imagination driver should now be good to go for RISC-V at large and also enabling the TH1520 GPU support. The Imagination driver also has improved power management code for this next version of the Linux kernel.
Some of the other separate drm-misc-next changes this week included improved error reporting for the Ryzen AI NPU “AMDXDNA” driver, unique IDs for AMDGPU kernel jobs, code clean-ups for the Intel NPU (IVPU) driver, improved error reporting for the Nouveau driver, and other minor alterations. See the drm-misc-next pull for the full list of changes sent out this week.
Along similar lines, sent out this weekend were the RISC-V T-HEAD Device Tree updates intended for Linux 6.18. Those DT updates include enabling the IMG BXM-4-64 GPU now that the driver support is there. This has been tested successfully with the likes of the Lichee Pi 4A single board computer and other hardware. But the display controller and HDMI output remain a work-in-progress.
