At the Kernel Maintainers Summit, Linus Torvalds announced that, barring unforeseen problems, patches to support driver development in Rust will be included in the Linux 6.1 kernel, scheduled for release in December.
The benefits of having Rust support in the kernel include simplifying the writing of safe device drivers by reducing the likelihood of memory-related errors and motivating new developers to get involved with the kernel. "Rust is one of those things that, I think, will attract new faces... we're getting older and grayer," said Linus.
Linus also announced that version 6.1 of the kernel will improve some of the oldest and most fundamental parts of the kernel, such as the printk() function. Additionally, Linus reminded that several decades ago, Intel tried to convince him that the future was in Itanium processors, but he replied, "No, that's not going to happen, as there's no development platform for it. ARM is doing everything right."
Another issue Torvalds pointed out was the fragmentation in ARM processor manufacturing: "crazy Wild West companies producing specialized chips for various tasks." He added that "this was a big problem when the first processors appeared; today there are enough standards to make it easy to port kernels to new ARM processors."
Additionally, the initial implementation of the rust-e1000 driver for Intel Ethernet adapters, partially written in Rust, has been published. The code still contains direct calls to some bindings in C, but there is ongoing work to replace them and add Rust abstractions necessary for writing network drivers (for accessing PCI, DMA, and kernel network APIs). In its current form, the driver successfully passes the ping test when run in QEMU, but does not yet work with real hardware.
Source: opennet.ru
