Rust heads into the kernel?
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In a lengthy message to the linux-kernel mailing list, Miguel Ojeda "introduced" the Rust for Linux project. It was likely not the first time that most kernel developers had heard of the effort; there was an extensive discussion of the project at the 2020 Linux Plumbers Conference, for example. It has also been raised before on the list. Now, the project is looking for feedback from the kernel community about its plans, thus the RFC posting on April 14.
Ojeda started by acknowledging that adding another implementation language to the kernel will be at least somewhat disruptive, so there need to be good reasons to do so. The kernel is already a highly complex body of code to understand and work with, adding a second language into the mix, with all of its complexities, only makes that worse. "Nevertheless, we believe that, even today, the advantages of using Rust outweighs the cost. "
Those benefits mainly stem from the memory-safety features of the Rust language. The hope is that the number of bugs in the kernel can be reduced by eliminating these kinds of problems, at least for the pieces that get implemented in Rust. For now, those pieces are envisioned to be well away from the core kernel code: Please note that the Rust support is intended to enable writing drivers and similar "leaf" modules in Rust, at least for the foreseeable future. In particular, we do not intend to rewrite the kernel core nor the major kernel subsystems (e.g. `kernel/`, `mm/`, `sched/`...). Instead, the Rust support is built on top of those.
