Writing a Rust GPU kernel driver

“The kernel driver connects a much larger UMD to the actual GPU…a key aspect of GPU drivers is allocating GPU memory.”

A new Rust driver for Arm Mali GPUs is coming to the Linux kernel. This piece walks through how GPU drivers actually work. User mode handles the graphics API complexity. Kernel mode allocates memory and submits jobs to hardware. Writing this in Rust instead of C means fewer memory safety bugs in critical system code.