Nouveau/NVK Driver Lands NIL Library Rewrite In Rust For Mesa 24.1

In addition to working on NOVA as a Rust-based, GSP-focused NVIDIA open-source kernel graphics driver being developed as the eventual successor to the existing Nouveau DRM kernel driver, over in user-space Mesa developers have begun landing a portion of their Nouveau/NVK driver library code rewritten in Rust.

Daniel Almeida began with rewriting Nouveau's NIL library in the Rust programming language. This initial Rust code for the Nouveau and NVK Vulkan user-space driver code has now been merged for Mesa 24.1.

This NIL rewrite in Rust is their first step toward coming up with a binding between C and Rust within Mesa. This isn't the first Rust code in Mesa in general though with Rusticl working out notably well for the modern Rust-based OpenCL driver. Furthermore, the NVK Vulkan driver a few months back merged NAK as their Rust-written compiler for this open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver.

This initial rewrite in Rust for the NIL portion of the Nouveau code is made up of 17 commits and reworking more than two thousand lines of code.

The merge request had been open since January while overnight finally reached a stage for merging into Mesa 24.1. It will be interesting to see what more Rust code comes to Mesa in the near-term.