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Re:Apple GPU drivers now in Asahi Linux by Gigachad on Wednesday December 07, 2022 @06:03AM (#33892995)
Not OP but I'm waiting for Rust support to be finished before I look at kernel development. Don't have any interest in writing C.
Re:Apple GPU drivers now in Asahi Linux by ploxiln on Wednesday December 07, 2022 @11:16AM (#33896118)
Honestly this is a bit of a fantasy. If you love Rust and hate C, and haven't looked into kernel development before ... it's a whole different ball-game than user-space Rust. With a variety of real-world hardware, and the complexity of modern CPUs, and demands of a variety of complex user-space software, you just don't have the "guarantees" and conveniences you want, at this layer. The hardware does what it does and you just have to deal with it. User-space C code can be way easier to reason about. For a small taste see https://lkml.org/lkml/2022/9/19/1105
Re:Apple GPU drivers now in Asahi Linux by Ar-Curunir on Wednesday December 07, 2022 @12:53PM (#33897619)
Yes, but dealing with low-level stuff in Rust is going to be easier than doing that in C. See for example the blog post by Asahi Lina talking about how it was easier to program the M1 GPU driver in Rust than it would have been in C.
Re:Apple GPU drivers now in Asahi Linux by caskstrength on Wednesday December 07, 2022 @07:35AM (#33893615)
Even in best case scenario Rust code will be confined to individual subsystems and drivers for a very long time. And even in these subsystems you will probably still have to interact with a lot of C code from shared data-structures in other subsystems.
Re:Apple GPU drivers now in Asahi Linux by xiphias2 on Wednesday December 07, 2022 @07:42AM (#33893665)
Most of Linux kernel is drivers, so if new drivers can be written in Rust, it's a huge win in safety for the whole world.