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⇱ New "Thames" Linux Accelerator Driver Posted Along With Companion Gallium3D Driver - Phoronix


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New "Thames" Linux Accelerator Driver Posted Along With Companion Gallium3D Driver

Written by Michael Larabel in Hardware on 14 January 2026 at 05:55 AM EST. 3 Comments
Tomeu Vizoso as the open-source developer behind the "Rocket" driver for reverse-engineered Rockchip NPU support, Teflon as a Mesa framework for TensorFlow Lite and NPU uses, and various Etnaviv driver work, has announced his newest creation: Thames.

Thames is a new DRM accelerator driver for Texas Instruments C7x DSPs. The C7x DSPs are found in SoCs like the TI J722S that powers the likes of the BeagleY-AI.

👁 BeagleY-AI


Vizoso developed the Thames driver as a Linux kernel DRM "accel" accelerator driver. Plus via this merge request is a Thames Gallium3D driver for Mesa to run TEFLON for the user-space portion of this AI accelerator driver.

While the focus is on machine learning / AI, Tomeu noted in that Mesa merge request that the hardware and driver should be able to even support Vulkan or OpenCL in the future.

This Thames driver stack also relies upon firmware blobs (update: Tomeu has clarified the firmware is actually open-source! Super!) for initializing the hardware, which can be found via this Git repository.

Those wishing to learn more about this Thames accelerator driver for the TI C7x DSPs can find the initial patch submission for review on the mailing list.

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.