Overview of a Modern DRM Driver
summary
Kernel driver for PowerVR GPUs is built from scratch since 2020 to present a Vulkan-first UAPI and achieve full conformance: development uses cheap AM625 dev boards and claims Vulkan 1.0 CTS conformance for the AXE116M GPU. It integrates DRM scheduler support while offloading actual scheduling to device firmware (reducing latency and CPU load) by declaring one priority and one entity per scheduler, and it adopts the common GPU VM library (seven to eight patch iterations) to handle allocation, sparse binding and complex address-space ops, removing fragile driver code.
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chapters (12)
- 0:00Modern DRM driver intro
- 2:34DRM scheduler role
- 11:24GPU VM management
- 17:05Bleeding-edge code challenges
- 20:17Q&A firmware drivers
- 24:12GPU dev hardware setup
- 26:45AMD firmware docs
- 31:01Career in GPU drivers
- 32:25Vulkan compliance future
- 35:20Open-sourcing motivation
- 37:28Licensing firewall process
- 38:31Functional safety in GPUs
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