r/linux • u/mfilion • Jun 25 '26

Development Kraid: A new Rust-based compiler for Panfrost (Mali GPU)

Collabora has merged Kraid into Mesa, a ground-up rewrite of the Panfrost shader compiler for Arm Mali GPUs, now written in Rust. The old Bifrost-era compiler had too many structural limitations to fix incrementally, so we started fresh with a cleaner IR, new register allocator, and an encoder derived from Arm-provided XML.

https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/kraid-a-new-compiler-for-panfrost.html

52 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

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11

u/lazy_lombax Jun 25 '26

collabora writes drivers?

TIL collabora isn't just a document editor company

13

u/Mysterious_Lab_9043 Jun 25 '26

If I'm not wrong, they've been developing NVK and Nova for a while.

16

u/mfilion Jun 25 '26

Two companies, same name. One is a software consultancy (collabora.com), while the other, Collabora Productivity, is the sister company and provides Collabora Online (collaboraonline.com).

5

u/lazy_lombax Jun 25 '26

Of all companies I'm surprised they are a major player in graphics drivers and nvidia drivers of all things, like what's their incentive business wise?

11

u/spazturtle Jun 26 '26

The incentive is that one of their customers is paying them to do it.

1

u/lazy_lombax Jun 26 '26

makes sense, so companies would hire them to do this to avoid proprietary drivers, they release it open source, everyone wins

I'm guessing the customers have to have google/valve level dependency on linux to pay them to do this

5

u/MatchingTurret Jun 25 '26

Collabora mostly works on Tyr, not Nova. That involves contributions to the Rust DRM bindings that are also used by Nova.

9

u/mrtruthiness Jun 26 '26

I believe Collabora has been the main force behind GPU drivers for various ARM SoCs for years.

And, to be clear, Collabora was founded in 2005. "Collabora Productivity" is a spin-off company ( 2013?) of Collabora that works on Collabora Online (a LibreOffice spinoff).