The Rust for Linux project aims to bring a new system programming language into the Linux kernel. Rust has a key property that makes it very interesti

Memory Safety for the World’s Largest Software Project

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2022-06-23 17:00:07

The Rust for Linux project aims to bring a new system programming language into the Linux kernel. Rust has a key property that makes it very interesting to consider as the second language in the kernel: it guarantees no undefined behavior takes place (as long as unsafe code is sound), particularly in terms of memory management. This includes no use-after-free issues, no double frees, no data races, etc.

Prossimo is an Internet Security Research Group (ISRG) project. Its goal is to improve the Internet's security-sensitive software infrastructure by addressing memory safety issues in C and C++ code via the use of memory safe languages. One critical example of such infrastructure is the Linux kernel, used in most servers in the world as well as in billions of devices.

The desire to write Linux kernel code in Rust has been around for quite a while, and different people have created out-of-tree modules with Rust over the years. The earliest attempt I am aware of is from 2013 by Taesoo Kim, which was even before Rust 1.0 was released.

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