Tyr, a new Rust DRM driver targeting CSF-based ARM Mali GPUs

Summary

Daniel Almeida July 07, 2025 The last year has seen substantial progress on the DRM infrastructure required to write GPU drivers in Rust. While a great part of it was fueled by the development of Nova (the new driver for GSP-based NVIDIA GPUs), and by AGX (the driver for the GPUs on Apple's M-series chip that preceded Nova), a few components were being worked on to cater to a then undisclosed driver that was being prototyped behind the scenes. A driver that we now introduce to the community at large in a very early stage. Tyr is a new Rust-based DRM driver for CSF-based Arm Mali GPUs, making Collabora the first consultancy to formally join the Rust-for-Linux initiative, a testament to our commitment to advancing Rust development within the kernel community. It is a port of Panthor - which is a mature driver written in C for the same hardware - and a joint effort between Collabora, Arm, and Google. In this sense, Tyr aims to eventually implement the same userspace API offered by Panthor for compatibility reasons, so that it can be used as a drop-in replacement in our Vulkan driver, called PanVK. We foresee Panthor being used - and of course supported - for a relatively long time, as it is a mature driver with a large adoption in the ecosystem. It will probably take a couple of years for Tyr to fully pick up. Over the course of the next few weeks, we will be releasing a series of blog posts that explain in detail the inner workings of Tyr and its components. This will be a walk-through for GPU drivers on Linux, so stay tuned! For now, we will address why we are submitting a patch to add an initial version of Tyr upstream and what exactly is contained in that submission. What's the purpose of the current upstream submission? This question will be easier to answer once we discuss how GPU drivers work. As we uncover the components that make up a kernel-mode driver and how they interact with the rest of the kernel, it will become clear that we simply cannot write a Rust G...