The rustificiation of Linux has been steadily progressing, with the most popular components being Red Hat's Nova GPU driver for NVIDIA GPUs and the Rust NVMe driver maintained by the kernel community.
As Rust continues to gain traction, new projects are popping up, each trying to integrate this memory-safe language into Linux, exploring new areas like GPU drivers, storage, and networking.
The newest of these efforts is Tyr, a GPU driver developed jointly by Collabora, Arm, and Google, aiming to bring Rust support to Mali CSF-based GPUs.
Tyr GPU Driver: What to Expect?
Taking its name from a Norse god, the Tyr GPU driver is a port of Panthor, a downstream kernel driver for ARM Mali CSF GPUs, and takes pointers from Nova and rust_platform_driver.rs (link).
At this stage, the driver is bare-bones with limited functionality. It can power on the GPU and perform basic device probing, but many advanced features are still under development.
Support is currently limited to the Rockchip RK3588 SoC, and future development aims to add full GPUVM support, enable MCU booting, and improve power management. Plans also include handling synchronization through VM_BIND and introducing a software scheduler for fair access to GPU resources.
At the current pace, I am fairly certain that we can achieve a working driver downstream in a couple of months, for a given definition of "working". In any case, reconciling this with upstream has been somewhat challenging recently, so this patch constitutes a change in the overall strategy that we have been using to develop Tyr so far.
You can visit Tyr's GitLab repo to dive into the source code and follow ongoing development and discussions.
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