A Kernel Maintainers Summit event, Linus Torvalds announced that, barring any unforeseen issues, patches for supporting driver development in Rust will be included in the Linux 6.1 kernel, which is expected to be released in December.
The advantages of Rust support in the kernel include simplifying the writing of safe device drivers by reducing the likelihood of memory management errors and encouraging new developers to get involved in kernel work. "Rust is one of those things that, I think, will attract new faces... we are aging and greying," said Linus.
Linus also announced that the 6.1 kernel version will improve some of the oldest and most fundamental parts of the kernel, such as the printk() function. Moreover, Linus reminded that several decades ago, Intel tried to convince him that the future belonged to Itanium processors, but he replied, "No, that won't happen because there is no development platform for it. ARM is doing everything right."
Another issue Torvalds highlighted was the inconsistency in ARM processor manufacturing: "crazy hardware companies from the Wild West making specialized chips for various tasks." He added that "this was a significant problem when the first processors appeared; today there are enough standards to make porting kernels to new ARM processors straightforward."
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 work is underway to gradually replace them and add necessary Rust abstractions for writing network drivers (for accessing PCI, DMA, and the kernel's network API). In its current form, the driver successfully passes the ping test when run in QEMU but does not yet work with real hardware.
Forrás: opennet.ru
