> 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.
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.
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.
They inarguably have slowed down, but this should be expected as the project matures. It has also inevitably now faced the time when new generations of contributors are needed as existing ones retire/ move to other projects.
Activity has died down as a result of general Linux kernel developer drama, petty in-fighting, and other factors, but that doesn't change the results they did produce during their most prolific phase so far.
Without proper support from upstream like AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm (to some extent) are doing, Linux will never work as well on Apple's hardware as it does on normal hardware.
> 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
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.
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.
> this has been happening for months and they don't give any reports about their progress
This seems a bit exaggerated, their latest progress report is barely two months old: https://asahilinux.org/2025/12/progress-report-6-18/
They inarguably have slowed down, but this should be expected as the project matures. It has also inevitably now faced the time when new generations of contributors are needed as existing ones retire/ move to other projects.
Activity has died down as a result of general Linux kernel developer drama, petty in-fighting, and other factors, but that doesn't change the results they did produce during their most prolific phase so far.
Without proper support from upstream like AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm (to some extent) are doing, Linux will never work as well on Apple's hardware as it does on normal hardware.
Wasn't it just a couple of weeks ago that they started supporting M3? That smells like progress to me.
One can start working on creation of a teleportation device. Doesn't mean we have it.
https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/feature-support/m3/
What do you see as progress here? Nothing is supported, everything is "to be announced" (i.e. unsupported).
Means that other platforms need to allow Rust in the kernel too in order to use future drivers.
What do you mean other platforms?
Also they can just expose c bindings to these rust libraries no?
The old drivers are mostly dual GPL or MIT licenced, they have been used in all the BSD variants.
that is so ridiculous.
> 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.
Interesting to see the building blocks come together. I hope that they can lay foundations that last.
Can't wait to write a Rust driver for my eink tablet <3
Tyr is a Danish metal band. Period. :-)
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.
Technically they are from the Faroe Islands. Great band, seen them live many times.
Faroese actually