cargo-deb VS Rust-for-Linux

Ok, AMDGPU_TOP v0.1.3 is released. And the deb package is released at the same time (thanks cargo-deb).

cargo deb?

Rust actually works fine with distros. See for example https://github.com/kornelski/cargo-deb and https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Rust_package_guidelines

I use Arch Linux and Most Rust programs I use are installed from the Arch repositories or AUR. Rust packages are very well integrated with the distro, they depend on distro packages and have other packages depend on it. As far as the user is concerned, the Rust build system is just a developer-only stuff like CMake or autotools or ninja or whatever.

Anyway I would like to point out that C++ also do something similar to what Rust libraries typically do, which is to use header-only libraries that don't appear as separate distro packages. It's as if every Rust library meant to be used by Rust programs (as opposed to libraries that expose a C API that can be called by other languages) were a header-only library. And this is actually great because Rust (like C++) monomorphizes generics, that is, if you call a generic function defined on another crate, the compiler actually generates a new function just with the type parameters you supplied, and there's no way the library can know upfront which generic instantiations will happen over all programs that use it.

On the reproducibility front, I think it would be great if C program actually did what Rust does and pinned the exact damn versions of all libraries they use (like Cargo.toml does)

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.