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 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 merged for Mesa 25.3 with the Rocket Gallium3D driver. That NPU-focused driver in Mesa is 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 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.
