Linux Gains “Tyr”: New Rust-Written Graphics Driver for Arm Mali GPUs Unveiled
On Friday evening, a surprising announcement introduced Tyr—a new graphics driver for the Linux kernel, written in Rust. Designed to support modern Arm Mali GPUs, the driver interfaces with the Direct Rendering Manager. Despite its name, Tyr offers no explicit indication of its Mali compatibility, likely drawing inspiration from Germanic-Scandinavian mythology, much like previous Arm architecture names such as Bifrost and Midgard.
Tyr will support the same Mali GPU generations as the existing Panthor driver—namely, Gen10 and newer. Both drivers rely on the Command Stream Frontend (CSF) firmware, which is essential for GPU communication. The project is being developed alongside the broader initiative to integrate Rust support into the Linux kernel and is ultimately intended to replace the C-based Panthor implementation.
The project was announced by Daniel Almeida of Collabora. According to him, the current iteration implements only a subset of features, as several necessary abstractions—such as GPU virtualization and virtual memory binding—are still under development. Thus far, the driver has only been tested on the Rockchip RK3588 SoC and is unlikely to function on other chips at this stage.
Despite these limitations, the goal of this initial release is to validate core mechanisms, particularly memory operations via the iomem platform. Future updates are expected to include support for the VM_BIND mechanism once development of the GPUVM abstraction is complete. The advent of new graphics drivers like Tyr greatly simplifies interaction with video hardware in contemporary Linux distributions.
The Tyr codebase builds upon the structure of NOVA, another Rust-based driver developed to support open-source NVIDIA GPUs. The project is a collaborative effort involving engineers from Collabora, Arm, and Google. Further details can be found in the Linux kernel developers’ mailing list.
