This is the best summary I could come up with:

Tomeu Vizoso who recently has been working on extending the Etnaviv open-source graphics driver to also support the Vivante NPU IP has made great progress on that with competitive performance to the proprietary NPU driver and upstreaming the Teflon framework into Mesa for handling the Neural Processing Unit.

Tomeu Vizoso has now shifted his attention to working on an open-source, reverse-engineered NPU driver for the AI hardware found in various Rockchip SoCs.

The userspace stack though is notoriously buggy and difficult to use, with basic features still unimplemented and performance being quite below what the hardware should be able to achieve.

His hope ultimately is to develop both a mainline-capable open-source kernel driver and relevant user-space for the Rockchip NPU.

So far he's off to a good start: "I started looking at a buffer that from the debug logs of the proprietary driver contained register writes, and when looking at the register descriptions in the TRM, I saw that it had to be closely based on NVIDIA's NVDLA open-source NPU IP.

More information on this new open-source NPU Linux driver adventure via Tomeu Vizoso's blog.

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