Also this is kernel code running in a kernel contex, so the code can’t just use std::sync::{Arc, Mutex}[1] because Mutex uses user-space pthread_mutex_lock[2]. The implementation is knarly™ multi-threaded kernel code so it would probably require unsafe custom code (rather than using kernel locking and concurrency-management mechanisms which were not used by the existing code for presumably valid reasons). The rust code could easily have had the same fault. Excepts from [3]:

  The VFS layer is a complicated beast; it must manage the complexities of the filesystem namespace in a way that provides the highest possible performance while maintaining security and correctness. Achieving that requires making use of almost all of the locking and concurrency-management mechanisms that the kernel offers, plus a couple more implemented internally
  the kernel may find itself with a set of in-flight Unix-domain sockets that are only referenced by unconsumed (and unconsumable) SCM_RIGHTS datagrams; at this point, it has a cycle of file structures holding the only references to each other.
  there is more complexity than has been described above and some gnarly locking issues involved in carrying out these operations. See Viro's message for the gory details.

rust is magic, but it doesn’t make us infallible.

[1] https://itsallaboutthebit.com/arc-mutex/

[2] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5095781/how-pthread-mute...

[3] https://lwn.net/Articles/779472/

Today the Rust std::sync::Mutex type (on Linux) just uses a futex, not the unwieldy pthread_mutex_lock (which on Linux ultimately has a futex inside it anyway).

This why Rust's Mutex<[16; u8]> (a Mutex protecting an array of 16 bytes) is significantly smaller than C++ std::mutex (which doesn't protect anything itself). This was already true on Windows, and for a few months it has been true on Linux too.

But you're correct that Rust for Linux doesn't have std, and so doesn't have std::sync::Mutex. However it does have kernel::sync::Mutex which is reminiscent of the standard library Mutex, e.g. Mutex<T> is a thing, locking defaults to giving you a guard with access to the protected contents, and so on. But being the kernel it has unsafe methods that look way more dangerous than I'd be comfortable with. The Linux kernel already needs a mutex type (in C) and so kernel::sync::Mutex<T> builds on that.

That's my guess too. These GC data structures need to be accessed from multiple threads, if I understood TFA, which means they won't compile normally in Rust. That is exactly Rust doing its job and preventing bugs, but it means that the developer then needs to use unsafe (or find a workaround with runtime checks, at the cost of overhead).

You're absolutely right, I had initially understood that revmsg with the MSG_PEEK flag was concurrently accessing GC data structures and presumably corrupting them.

Instead yes, this is essentially a logic bug in the presence of concurrency, and no programming language can help with those. It would have happened just as well with Software Transactional Memory or with Erlang message passing.