I have been working on the same A733 GPU problem from the vendor-kernel side and now have a hardware-validated Cubie A7Z image available.
Verified on a physical A7Z:
- PowerVR BXM-4-64 hardware rendering instead of llvmpipe
- Vulkan, OpenCL 3.0, EGL/GBM and OpenGL ES 3.2
- Hardware-accelerated Plasma Wayland/KWin
- Packaged XWayland acceleration
- Ready-to-flash Debian 12 image
- Vendor-kernel fallback and early-fsck recovery boot entries
Repository and validation evidence:
https://github.com/cuihuir/radxa-a7z-debian12
This is not an Armbian image and currently uses the 5.15 A733 BSP kernel with the matching PowerVR DDK. It may still be useful as a working reference for comparison with the experimental
mainline PowerVR work in this thread. Additional A7Z hardware reports are welcome.