Introduce a new accel driver for the Neutron Neural Processing Unit (NPU), along with associated dt-bindings and DTS node.
The first patch extends the GEM DMA helper APIs to allow bidirectional mapping of non-coherent DMA buffers. While not part of the Neutron driver, it's a prerequisite allowing us to use the GEM DMA helper.
Neutron is a Neural Processing Unit from NXP, providing machine learning (ML) acceleration for edge AI applications. Neutron is integrated on NXP SoCs such as the i.MX95.
The NPU consists of the following: - RISC-V core running a proprietary firmware - One or more Neutron cores, representing the main computation engine performing ML operations - Dedicated fast memory (TCM) - DMA engine that handles data transfers between DDR and TCM
The firmware is closed source and distributed as a binary here [1].
The Neutron software stack also contains a userspace library [1] and a LiteRT custom delegate [2] that allow integration with standard LiteRT tools.
[1] https://github.com/nxp-upstream/neutron/tree/upstream [2] https://github.com/nxp-imx/tflite-neutron-delegate
Signed-off-by: Ioana Ciocoi-Radulescu ruxandra.radulescu@nxp.com --- Changes in v2: - rebase on newer drm-misc-next - dt bindings: clock fixes and renames - update DTS to match new names - remove unnecessary fields from neutron_job structure - fix use of uninitialized variable
- Link to v1: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20260226-neutron-v1-0-46eccb3bb50a@nxp.com
--- Ioana Ciocoi-Radulescu (9): drm/gem-dma: Add flag for bidirectional mapping of non-coherent GEM DMA buffers accel/neutron: Add documentation for NXP Neutron accelerator driver dt-bindings: npu: Add NXP Neutron accel/neutron: Add driver for NXP Neutron NPU accel/neutron: Add GEM buffer object support accel/neutron: Add mailbox support accel/neutron: Add job submission IOCTL accel/neutron: Add logging support arm64: dts: imx95: Add Neutron node
Documentation/accel/index.rst | 1 + Documentation/accel/neutron/index.rst | 12 + Documentation/accel/neutron/neutron.rst | 131 ++++++++ .../devicetree/bindings/npu/nxp,imx95-neutron.yaml | 96 ++++++ MAINTAINERS | 10 + arch/arm64/boot/dts/freescale/imx95.dtsi | 28 ++ drivers/accel/Kconfig | 1 + drivers/accel/Makefile | 3 +- drivers/accel/neutron/Kconfig | 16 + drivers/accel/neutron/Makefile | 12 + drivers/accel/neutron/neutron_debugfs.c | 34 ++ drivers/accel/neutron/neutron_debugfs.h | 15 + drivers/accel/neutron/neutron_device.c | 239 +++++++++++++ drivers/accel/neutron/neutron_device.h | 155 +++++++++ drivers/accel/neutron/neutron_driver.c | 262 +++++++++++++++ drivers/accel/neutron/neutron_driver.h | 16 + drivers/accel/neutron/neutron_gem.c | 116 +++++++ drivers/accel/neutron/neutron_gem.h | 14 + drivers/accel/neutron/neutron_job.c | 372 +++++++++++++++++++++ drivers/accel/neutron/neutron_job.h | 43 +++ drivers/accel/neutron/neutron_mailbox.c | 47 +++ drivers/accel/neutron/neutron_mailbox.h | 42 +++ drivers/gpu/drm/drm_gem_dma_helper.c | 6 +- include/drm/drm_gem_dma_helper.h | 3 + include/uapi/drm/neutron_accel.h | 130 +++++++ 25 files changed, 1801 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-) --- base-commit: 6716101ae42949e98ad4b9e71eeba08c055be410 change-id: 20260226-neutron-c435e39d167f
Best regards,