Imagination BXE4-32 GPU will be embedded in VisionFive and StarFive JH7110.
Current Status:
Next plan:
All updates will be kept and updated in Open Source GPU Driver - Imagination Developer, please stay tuned.
Hello,
Are there any news when it comes to the kernel driver for the BXE4-32 GPU?
I checked both upstream and in the linked repository for upstreamable kernel modules and couldn’t find any reference to it in the driver.
Please add your voices to the issue asking for the drivers.
I think starfive should sponsor them to do the work, if it ever wants the GPU to be anything useful.
Why you need the GPU Driver Libre? when the Blob firmware is mandatory in Gnu Userland.
Just not make sense…and for me does not matter anything. F#ck Open source Ideology.
It’s needed because otherwise people can’t improve upon the GPU driver and add support for more APIs as they come along.
Maybe if it was open source we could have real desktop opengl already
Hi,
Thanks for your open source effort on GPU software stack!
Any updates on this topic/project?
It seems none of the riscv SoC vendors who’s using the IMG IP is willing to spend the money or effort to upstream the GPU driver. The only upstreaming effort for IMG now is paid by TI for their ARM SoCs.
It’s driving me insane. I’m waiting and I’ve been waiting for literal years.
I need some update from imagination or starfive about the driver situation, because while there has been progress it hasn’t given us a usable end result yet and I’m honestly getting fed up.
They promised us a driver by last year and they still haven’t delivered. Not even an ugly hacked up out of tree fork mesa.
According to the Mesa Wiki, a GPU in the same family (B-Series) is currently being worked on: https://docs.mesa3d.org/drivers/powervr.html. Since there is only one GPU listed per family, I suspect that the chosen hardware covers GPUs in the same group.
That page also mentions that you can set:
PVR_I_WANT_A_BROKEN_VULKAN_DRIVER=1
If you find a way to set that variable before graphics start during the boot process, it may allow you to proceed with buggy graphics until the drivers stabilize.
You’ll probably want to compile the latest version of the right development branch of Mesa.
I don’t know what’s the status of the kernel drivers, but unless StarFive is hiding a binary module in their linux.git fork, there should be free code of some kind. It looks like you could compile their kernel to get something working on that end. See the “Debian image build instructions” link from the following quoted post. Some of the steps on that page include installing proprietary software, including a non-free GL user space driver, so I suggest building just the kernel, and skipping the non-free parts.
Also, Imagination has an open source GPU status page, but they only mention the “Rogue” series / Series 6, not the B-Series. (See the “Imgaination open source PowerVR links” link at the above quoted post).
My guess is that if the above doesn’t work, there are still people working on free drivers that will work for the BXE-4-32. Just like Debian, I’m sure that they’ll be released when they’re ready. The good thing is that there’s ongoing work on it.
The GPU we want is explicitly not supported by the Mesa driver. What now? We’re screwed.
Can an external graphics card be used?
We need a developer to integrate the existing firmware.
I know someone that added an AMD GPU, but it’s not trivial.