The Future for Tyr, a Rust GPU Driver for Arm Mali Hardware

davikr•2 hours ago

> Dave Airlie just announced in the Maintainers Summit that the DRM subsystem is only ""about a year away"" from disallowing new drivers written in C and requiring the use of Rust.

wow

jeroenhd•1 hour ago

When the C absolutist maintainers fought for control over the ability to keep Rust out of their ballpark, I didn't expect the reverse to happen.

Still, I think it makes a lot of sense. Completely new GPU drivers are quite rare and the macOS drivers from Asahi are a showcase proving that Rust and GPU drivers work together well. If there's any subcomponent switching to Rust-first for new contributions, it makes sense for it to be the one that had already been proven to be Rust-compatible.

imcritic•1 hour ago

Asahi project looks barely alive, almost abandoned. I know that their explanation of low activity is that they are being active elsewhere, supposedly pushing all their work upstream, but this has been happening for months and they don't give any reports about their progress, so I'm worried it will all die soon. And given that the project barely brought some Linux compatibility for m1 and m2 hardware and no prospects for bringing similar compatibility for newer generations - I fear it all will be kinda useless in the end.

kryptiskt•1 hour ago

Wasn't it just a couple of weeks ago that they started supporting M3? That smells like progress to me.

rjsw•45 minutes ago

Means that other platforms need to allow Rust in the kernel too in order to use future drivers.

jsheard•16 minutes ago

Windows is heading in that direction: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/windowsdriverdev/to...

hexo•15 minutes ago

that is so ridiculous.

tialaramex•1 hour ago

> One simply cannot deploy a driver that [...] crashes and takes the user's work with it.

Somebody needs to tell whoever wrote the drivers in the PC where I'm writing this.

GZGavinZhao•1 hour ago

Can't wait to write a Rust driver for my eink tablet <3

AndrewDucker•2 hours ago

Interesting to see the building blocks come together. I hope that they can lay foundations that last.

Aldipower•2 hours ago

Tyr is a Danish metal band. Period. :-)

robert_foss•1 hour ago

I thought Tyr was the Norse god of War & Justice.

Considering that the Mali GPUs were developed by ARM Norway, and this driver is Just, I would say this is one aptly named driver.

MisterTea•1 hour ago

Technically they are from the Faroe Islands. Great band, seen them live many times.

MilanTodorovic•1 hour ago

Faroese actually

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