On Rust in enterprise kernels
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By Jonathan Corbet October 10, 2024 At the recently concluded Maintainers Summit, it was generally agreed that the Rust experiment would continue, and that the path was clear for more Rust code to enter the kernel. But the high-level view taken at such gatherings cannot always account for the difficult details that will inevitably arise as the Rust work proceeds. A recent discussion on the nouveau mailing list may have escaped the notice of many, but it highlights some of the problems that will have to be worked out as important functionality written in Rust heads toward the mainline.
Some context to begin: the nouveau driver handles NVIDIA GPUs. It was, for years, the product of a determined reverse-engineering effort in the absence of any help from NVIDIA; it was first merged into the mainline for the 2.6.33 release in 2009. More recently, NVIDIA has been changing its tune with regard to free-software support for its products, and has been helping with nouveau development. Ben Skeggs, who has worked on nouveau for years, recently took up employment there.
