At the Kernel Maintainers Summit, Linus Torvalds announced that, barring unforeseen problems, patches to support Rust driver development will be included in the Linux 6.1 kernel, which is expected to be released in December.
One of the benefits of having Rust support in the kernel is the simplification of writing safe device drivers by reducing the likelihood of making errors when working with memory and motivating new developers to get involved in working on the kernel. "Rust is one of those things that I think will bring in new faces... we're getting old and gray," Linus said.
Linus also announced that kernel version 6.1 will improve some of the oldest and most fundamental parts of the kernel, such as the printk() function. In addition, Linus recalled that several decades ago Intel tried to convince him that Itanium processors were the future, but he replied, “No, that won’t happen because there is no development platform for it. ARM is doing everything right."
Another problem Torvalds identified was the inconsistency in the production of ARM processors: “crazy hardware companies from the Wild West, making specialized chips for various tasks.” He added that "this was a big problem when the first processors came out, today there are enough standards to make it easy to port kernels to new ARM processors."
Additionally, we can note the publication of the initial implementation of the rust-e1000 driver for Intel Ethernet adapters, partially written in the Rust language. The code still contains direct calls to some C bindings, but gradual work is underway to replace them and add Rust abstractions necessary for writing network drivers (for access to PCI, DMA and kernel network APIs). In its current form, the driver successfully passes the ping test when launched in QEMU, but does not yet work with real hardware.
Source: opennet.ru