A pair of Rust kernel modules

submited by

Style Pass

2022-09-23 00:00:11

The primary benefit from subscribing to LWN is helping to keep us publishing, but, beyond that, subscribers get immediate access to all site content and access to a number of extra site features. Please sign up today!

By Jonathan Corbet September 12, 2022 Kangrejos The idea of being able to write kernel code in the Rust language has a certain appeal, but it is hard to judge how well that would actually work in the absence of examples to look at. Those examples, especially for modules beyond the "hello world" level of complexity, have been somewhat scarce, but that is beginning to change. At the 2022 Kangrejos gathering in Oviedo, Spain, two developers presented the modules they have developed and some lessons that have been learned from this exercise.

Andreas Hindborg was up first to talk about an NVM Express driver written in Rust. The primary reason for this project, he said, was to take advantage of the memory-safety guarantees that Rust offers and to gain some real-world experience with the language. His conclusions from this project include that Rust comes with a lot of nice tooling and that its type system is helpful for writing correct code. It is, he said, easier to write a kernel driver in Rust than in C.