Once these patches land, network drivers will be able to be written in Rust.
Slowly but surely, the solid blocks are being placed. Some people are saying it’s happening too slowly, but I’ve read a lot of Kernel developers are worried it’s happening too fast.
It’s certainly happening a lot faster than I expected. It will be interesting to see how the stability of rust drivers will be. Prior to reading the write-up of why the GPU drivers for the M1 silicon was written in Rust, I could not see how it would be beneficial to introduce a new point of failure by adding Rust support in the kernel, but now I think it’s a good idea to slowly migrate in that direction. It just means that I will have to teach myself Rust sooner or later.
People aren’t drooling over rust for no reason :)
Regarding the M1, yea… I’ve actually got mine sitting beside me right now (because I borked my main computer an hour ago and needed it). It runs incredibly impressively - I’ve even gotten Minecraft to 60FPS. Considering they’re writing the drivers from scratch with no documentation on the parts they’re implementing, it’s mind boggling.
I’m shocked given this quote by Torvalds “Quite frankly, even if the choice of C were to do nothing but keep the C++ programmers out, that in itself would be a huge reason to use C.” https://lwn.net/Articles/249460/
It’s felt like it’s going pretty fast to me, especially for a change to the kernel. I’m very excited to start seeing more Rust additions going forward!
This means kernels would be very secure after being written in rust correct?
Rust prevents a lot of silly mistakes, but if it had to be quantified, I would say in general it would be “twice as secure”
