Started just over one year ago was the effort to create an open-source Rockchip NPU driver. While not yet mainlined to the Linux kernel, progress on this kernel driver and associated user-space driver continues.
The Rockchip NPU driver was started by Tomeu Vizoso who continues working on it as time allows. The Rockchip NPU driver has been in working form for a while and February brought the most recent revision of the driver.
In a new blog post, Vizoso outlined recent work on this driver that is now able to utilize all three NPU cores and should be capable of handling four simultaneous object detection inferences at around 30 frames per second.
On Friday the v3 patch series was posted for this driver. Among the changes in the v3 series is adding support for the Rockchip NPU found within the ROCK 5B board. Separately is this merge request adding the “Rocket” code to Mesa for the user-space side support.
Long story short, the Rockchip open-source NPU Linux driver is still being worked on toward upstreaming.
