It was just one month ago that open-source developer Tomeu Vizoso was beginning work on reverse-engineering and writing a Rockchip NPU driver following his work on the Vivante NPU IP open-source driver support. He quickly began seeing the driver working and with very viable performance and now today he's shared another update on this Rockchip open-source NPU driver effort.

Vizoso has managed to enable real-time object detection using the NPU on the Rockchip RK3588 SoC with around 30 FPS performance using the SSSDLite MobileDet model.

Now that real-time object detection is working and the Rockchip open-source driver proving useful, next he's going to be focusing on writing a replacement kernel driver. The open-source kernel driver will be designed from the start to be suitable for upstreaming into the mainline Linux kernel as part of the "accel" accelerator subsystem.

In his blog post he notes there is still a lot of work remaining but work on this Rockchip open-source NPU effort is advancing quickly.