Re:Rustaceans at the border
by yjftsjthsd-h on Friday April 15, 2022 @10:41AM
(#31040801)
> How would that work in reality? Re-use the existing tests to build a new kernel from scratch? Sounds like a very far-out idea that wouldn't help with any of the current problems, but I'm happy to entertain the idea and hear your reasoning here.
While I would tend to agree that a full production replacement would be such a massive undertaking as to be impractical, https://github.com/nuta/kerla does something very like that - Linux userspace ABI on an all-new Rust kernel. (And even at this small scale, I find it mind-blowing that this worked)
Re:Rustaceans at the border
by ImprobableTruth on Friday April 15, 2022 @02:11PM
(#31043593)
Since they're complaining about maintainability, I assume they're advocating for microkernels?
As we only have two other "big" (popular) kernels to compare to this one, do you think they (Apple and Microsoft) have more people "holistically" understanding the entire kernel or less? Since the nature of those companies are closed-source, I'm fairly certain even less people understand those ones "holistically".
> I do not support adding it to the Kernel, I think we should just throw away the kernel entirely, but I understand why they're looking at Rust.
How would that work in reality? Re-use the existing tests to build a new kernel from scratch? Sounds like a very far-out idea that wouldn't help with any of the current problems, but I'm happy to entertain the idea and hear your reasoning here.