Title	
Writing a bare metal driver for the Intel Arc A GPU in Rust

Author
Jona Heywinkel Jona.Heywinkel@hhu.de Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf

Abstract
Modern operating systems must provide support for Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) to enable applications such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and interactive graphics. Hardware vendors typically supply drivers only for major commercial operating systems such as Linux, Microsoft Windows, and macOS. Consequently, the development of a new operating system is often hindered by the lack of available device drivers. GPU drivers pose a particularly significant challenge: modern GPUs are highly complex and hardware specifications are often unavailable or not complete.


Most existing open-source GPU drivers are written in C and often support several hardware generations, resulting in large and difficult-to-understand code bases. As a consequence, there are virtually no bare-metal drivers for modern GPUs for alternative operating system (neither in C nor Rust).

This talk presents a Rust-based driver for the compute engine of the Intel Arc A-series GPU developed for the D3OS research operating system.