Re:Ask HN: When Will Rust-for-Linux Be Completed?
by smoldesu on Saturday December 10, 2022 @03:03PM
(#33936247)
There are no current initiatives to start porting portions of the kernel into Rust wholesale. The recent Rust support was merely giving Kernel developers the option to use Rust in situations where memory safety might be preferred.
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Re:Ask HN: When Will Rust-for-Linux Be Completed?
by worldsavior on Saturday December 10, 2022 @03:10PM
(#33936318)
Isn't memory safety needed in all cases?
Re:Ask HN: When Will Rust-for-Linux Be Completed?
by smoldesu on Saturday December 10, 2022 @03:17PM
(#33936405)
Not really. There are a lot of things we can do fairly reliably without guaranteed memory safety, and the danger-zones that do exist are pretty clearly mapped and well-known to kernel devs. There are also a lot of things that do need memory safety, but the architecture is usually designed to minimize UB and keep things simple as possible. If you manage to segfault a modern Linux kernel, you're probably using extremely unsupported hardware.
Rewriting Linux in Rust is veritably impossible anyways. It would require re-reviewing over 3 decades of kernel contributions and locking down high-quality 1:1 replications of the previous code. It's just not going to happen, at least not while the standards for merging to the kernel is so high.