Resources for learning Rust for kernel development

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2024-10-04 12:30:15

Dirk Behme led a second session, back-to-back with his session on error handling at Kangrejos 2024, discussing providing better guidance for users of the kernel's Rust abstractions. Just after that, Carlos Bilbao and Miguel Ojeda had their own time slot dedicated to collecting resources that could be of use to someone trying to come up to speed on kernel development in Rust. The attendees provided a lot of guidance in both sessions, and discussed what they could do to make things easier for people coming from non-Rust backgrounds.

He opened the session by noting that "most of you are special" — that the attendees were, by and large, already knowledgeable about Rust. They have written drivers, seen that abstractions were missing, and written the abstractions as well. So nearly everyone in the room was an expert, who knew all of the details of how Rust works in the Linux kernel. Behme isn't a computer-science person, though. His background is in electrical engineering.

He put up a picture of Linux Device Drivers, 3rd edition, asking: does there also need to be a book about Rust kernel abstractions? Rust is said to have a steep learning curve — and Rust-for-Linux goes even further, since it involves writing low-level code in a particular style and the kernel is always under heavy development.