vulkan driver issues for PowerVR BXE-2-32 using Blender

[Raphael Langerhorst]

Hello,

I am trying to get Blender running on a ROMA-II Laptop, which has a RISCV
CPU and a PowerVR BXE-2-32 GPU. The CPU part seems to be working by now
(blender main source code), but I am having issues with the GPU and don't
know exactly where to look.

There is an issue reported on Blender Projects related to this setup.
Maybe you can take a look, specifically at the issues with Fences listed
in this post

https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/issues/130860#issuecomment-1362544

Where issues like this turn up:

(22564) PVR:(Error): PVRSRVFenceMergeI: SYNC_IOC_MERGE ioctl failed for
the fences 46 and 48 (No such file or directory) [ :358 ]
(22564) PVR:(Error): PVRSRVFenceDestroyI: Fence close fd=48 failed (Bad
file descriptor) [ :379 ]
(22564) PVR:(Error): PVRSRVFenceMergeI: SYNC_IOC_MERGE ioctl failed for
the fences 42 and 50 (No such file or directory) [ :358 ]
(22564) PVR:(Error): PVRSRVFenceDestroyI: Fence close fd=50 failed (Bad
file descriptor) [ :379 ]
(22564) PVR:(Error): PVRSRVFenceDupI: Fence dup fd=48 failed (Bad file
descriptor) [ :428 ]
(22564) PVR:(Error): PVRSRVFenceWaitI: sync_wait failed on fence 48 (22
Invalid argument) [ :287 ]
(22564) PVR:(Error): PVRSRVFenceDupI: Fence dup fd=48 failed (Bad file
descriptor) [ :428 ]
(22564) PVR:(Error): PVRSRVFenceDupI: Fence dup fd=48 failed (Bad file
descriptor) [ :428 ]
(22564) PVR:(Error): PVRSRVFenceDestroyI: Fence close fd=48 failed (Bad
file descriptor) [ :379 ]
(22564) PVR:(Error): PVRSRVFenceMergeI: SYNC_IOC_MERGE ioctl failed for
the fences 42 and 52 (No such file or directory) [ :358 ]
(22564) PVR:(Error): PVRSRVFenceDestroyI: Fence close fd=52 failed (Bad
file descriptor) [ :379 ]

Is there a way to run Mesa in software emulation mode to see if it is a
driver/HW related issue?

Any hints would be appreciated. I am not familiar with any of the
components involved (neither Blender source code, nor Mesa source code,
nor Vulkan), so it is difficult for me to figure out where to look
further.

Thank you,
Raphael