Collabora has announced progress in the development of the Tyr driver for the Linux kernel, written in Rust. The driver is designed for use with ARM Mali GPUs that employ the CSF (Command Stream Frontend) technology, such as the Mali G310, G510, and G710. It is noted that Tyr has reached a level suitable for supporting the GNOME desktop environment, the Weston compositor, and fullscreen games like SuperTuxKart. The performance of the new driver is assessed as comparable to the Panthor driver, which is written in C.
The Tyr driver code has been accepted into the Linux 6.18 kernel, with its release expected in early December. However, the driver is not yet ready for regular usage by end users and is regarded as an experimental prototype for testing abstractions for driver development in Rust.
The new driver framework utilizes components from the abstract rust_platform_driver and from the Nova driver, developed for NVIDIA GPUs and written in Rust, which was added to the Linux kernel 6.16. Functionality for interacting with Mali GPUs has been ported from the existing Panthor DRM driver, which is written in C. The Tyr driver’s uAPI is identical to that of the Panthor driver, allowing existing user-space components to work with it.
The CSF technology, used starting with the 10th generation of Mali GPUs, is notable for offloading certain driver functions to firmware and employing a new model for organizing work execution on the GPU. In GPUs with a CSF interface, instead of a job chaining model, a command stream model is used, with command stream queue scheduling handled by the firmware. A separate Cortex-M7 microcontroller is built into the GPU to manage the scheduler, and a specialized Command Execution Unit is provided for executing CSF instructions.
Source: opennet.ru
