At the Kernel Maintainers Summit event, Linus Torvalds announced that if unforeseen problems do not pop up, patches to support the development of drivers in Rust will be included in the Linux 6.1 nucleus, the release of which is expected in December.
From the advantages of support for Rust in the core is called to simplify the writing of safe drivers of devices by reducing the likelihood of making errors when working with memory and motivating new developers to include in work on the nucleus. “Rust is one of those things that, as I think, will attract new faces,” he said, “we are aging and gray,” said Linus.
Linus also announced that some oldest and fundamental parts of the nucleus, such as the Printk () function, will be improved in the nuclear version 6.1.
In addition, Linus recalled that several decades ago Intel tried to convince him, one hundred future behind the Itanium processors, but he answered no, this will not happen, because there is no platform for development for him. ARM does everything correctly. “
Another problem by Torvalds indicated that ARM processors are now as “crazy equipment for the production of equipment from the Wild West that make specialized chips for various tasks.” He added that “this was a big problem when the first processors appeared, today there are enough standards to make simple air for the new ARM processors.”
You can additionally note the initial implementation of the driver for rust-e1000 for Ethernet Adaptors of Intel, partially written in the language Rust. There is a direct call of some bindings on SI in the code, but a gradual work is underway to replace them and add RUS-abstracts necessary for writing network drivers (for access to PCI, DMA and network API nucleus). In the current form, the driver successfully takes place a Ping test when launching in Qemu, but so far does not work with real equipment.