Rust-for-Linux VS Rocket

Rust is backwards compatible when you stick to stable features, but the kernel uses unstable features that can and do incur breaking changes.

https://github.com/Rust-for-Linux/linux/issues/2

> How would this work?

Don't know exactly what you're asking.

> And why would it be a better idea?

Poorly written device drivers are a significant attack vector. It's one of the reasons Linux is now exploring using Rust for its own device drivers.[0] You may be asking -- why Rust and not some other language? Rust has many of the performance and interoperability advantages of C and C++, but as noted, makes certain classes of memory safety issues impossible. Rust also has significant mindshare among systems programming communities.

[0]: https://rust-for-linux.com

Ctrl-F "rust"

https://rust-for-linux.com/ links to LWN articles at https://lwn.net/Kernel/Index/#Development_tools-Rust that suggest that only basic modules are yet possible with the rust support in Linux kernels 6.2 and 6.3.

Rust-for-linux links to the Android binder module though:

> Android Binder Driver: This project is an effort to rewrite Android's Binder kernel driver in Rust.

> Motivation: Binder is one of the most security and performance critical components of Android. Android isolates apps from each other and the system by assigning each app a unique user ID (UID). This is called "application sandboxing", and is a fundamental tenet of the Android Platform Security Model.

> The majority of inter-process communication (IPC) on Android goes through Binder. Thus, memory unsafety vulnerabilities are especially critical when they happen in the Binder driver

... "Rust in the Linux kernel" (2021) https://security.googleblog.com/2021/04/rust-in-linux-kernel... :

> [...] We also need designs that allow code in the two languages to interact with each other: we're particularly interested in safe, zero-cost abstractions that allow Rust code to use kernel functionality written in C, and how to implement functionality in idiomatic Rust that can be called seamlessly from the C portions of the kernel.

> Since Rust is a new language for the kernel, we also have the opportunity to enforce best practices in terms of documentation and uniformity. For example, we have specific machine-checked requirements around the usage of unsafe code: for every unsafe function, the developer must document the requirements that need to be satisfied by callers to ensure that its usage is safe; additionally, for every call to unsafe functions (or usage of unsafe constructs like dereferencing a raw pointer), the developer must document the justification for why it is safe to do so.

> We'll now show how such a driver would be implemented in Rust, contrasting it with a C implementation. [...]

This guide with unsafe rust that calls into the C, and then with next gen much safer rust right next to it would be a helpful resource too.

What of the post-docker container support (with userspaces also written in go) should be cloned to rust first?

Rust-for-Linux issue tracker

Yes, I definitely agree that it's a problem that pr_info implicitly wraps its arguments in unsafe {}. I wrote my own Pull Request with a trival fix.

Note that this template won't work with Linux 6.1, which has very minimal Rust support. You'll want the RustForLinux tree, or maybe Linux 6.2.

You can join Rust for Linux zulip chat by requesting invite using the link in https://github.com/Rust-for-Linux/linux 's README.

4. Rocket

If you want something simpler/more minimal, you could use https://rocket.rs/ for the backend and handle the front-end however you want.

I’m the author of https://kellnr.io. When I started working on Kellnr three years ago, https://rocket.rs was “the web framework” to use. Unfortunately, the project seems dead. Before adding more functionality using an unmaintained framework, I want to port Kellnr to https://github.com/tokio-rs/axum.

Or else you could of course just use https://rocket.rs/

Rust is a popular system programming language, known for its robust memory safety features and exceptional performance. While Rust was originally a system programming language, its application has evolved. Now you can see Rust in different app platforms, mobile apps, and of course, in web apps — both in the frontend and backend, with frameworks like Rocket, Axum, and Actix making it even easier to build web applications with Rust.

I've done some research but I have to admit that creating embedded devices is a totally new subject for me, but that is the point of the project - main goal is learning, and creating something is the secondary goal, so please bear with me and my knowledge of the subject. So, for the hardware I've seen many people recommending SMT32 family devices, but I've also read that anything with the Cortex-M processor can be suitable. Need more info on that. OS is a hard choice for me because on one hand I was thinking of Ubuntu Core but the device support is not really that good I think, so other options I've found are Tock and RIOT-OS, and I am gravitating towards the latter because it's main focus is on IOT devices. I've found frameworks like Rocket.rs for a web app, tauri.app for desktop app (which might not be needed but I still like the idea). Also found Tokio.rs which apparently will help with the networking. There was a discussion from the other members about using the Golioth cloud platform with Zephyr and C++, and I don't know if there are any other alternatives for Golioth that support Rust, I've found webthings.io but I am not sure if it's an alternative, or something else actually, so I would be happy to learn more about that. Again I want to hear your recommendations regarding anything that will help creating a project like that.

I use Rocket on the backend with Postgres. Currently experimenting with Yew for the frontend.