min-sized-rust
Rust-for-Linux
Our great sponsors
min-sized-rust | Rust-for-Linux | |
---|---|---|
101 | 79 | |
7,301 | 3,769 | |
- | 1.9% | |
6.2 | 0.0 | |
12 days ago | 4 days ago | |
Rust | C | |
MIT License | GNU General Public License v3.0 or later |
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
min-sized-rust
-
The Linux Kernel Prepares for Rust 1.77 Upgrade
This is a good guide on building small Rust binaries: https://github.com/johnthagen/min-sized-rust
This talks about going to extreme lengths on making the smallest Rust binary possible, 400 bytes when it was written, https://darkcoding.net/software/a-very-small-rust-binary-ind...
The thing is, you lose a lot of nice features when you do this, like panic unwinding, debug symbols, stdlib… for kernel and some embedded development it’s definitely important, but for most use cases, does it matter?
-
Making Rust binaries smaller by default
Are you sure? If so then this is awesome news, but I'm a bit confused; the commit in that min-sized-rust repo adding `build-std` to the README was merged in August 2021: https://github.com/johnthagen/min-sized-rust/pull/30
Are you saying that at that point the feature still hadn't "landed in Rust nightly" until recently? If so then what's the difference between a feature just being available in Rust nightly, vs having "landed"?
It's really a shame that Rust includes the stdlib piecemeal in binary form, debug symbols and all, in every resulting binary.
I do love Rust but binary sizes have always annoyed me greatly and I always had this nagging feeling that part of all programmers don't rake Rust seriously because of that. And I actually have witnessed, several times in the last 2-ish years, older-school programmers berate and ignore Rust on that basis alone (so the author is quite right to call this out as a factor).
Looking at the https://github.com/johnthagen/min-sized-rust repo, final binary size of 51 KB when compilation / linking / stripping takes stdlib into account (and not just blindly copy-pasting the 4MB binary blob) is acceptable and much more reasonable. I wouldn't care for further micro-optimizations e.g. going to 20KB or even 5KB (further down the README file).
I also don't use nightly in my Rust work so I guess I'll have to wait several more years. :(
My go to reference when I want to reduce rust binary size is the excellent https://github.com/johnthagen/min-sized-rust, a set of guidelines on how to reduce size with explanations of the consequences
-
Was Rust Worth It?
Rust binaries are by default nowhere close to 500MB. If they are not small enough for you, you can try https://github.com/johnthagen/min-sized-rust. By avoiding the formatting machinery and using `panic_immediate_abort` you can get about the size of C binaries.
- Error on flashing embedded code to stm32f103
-
Shared libraries
This is not quite what you're asking, but it does also address the underlying concern: https://github.com/johnthagen/min-sized-rust
-
Announcing lavagna v2, a collaborative blackboard made with bevy and WebRTC
And what about the binary size? Applying some cheats found in the Unofficial Bevy Cheat Book and in the Minimizing Rust Binary Size article I’ve achieved to fit the whole wasm binary in less than 10M, which become 2.8M when gzip compressed.
-
Which GUI toolkit for Rust today.. few questions...
Rust binaries are so huge because the default settings turn off most size optimizations to reduce compile times. Read through this page.
Rust-for-Linux
-
The Linux Kernel Prepares for Rust 1.77 Upgrade
At least according to the Github's language breakdown for https://github.com/Rust-for-Linux/linux, C is still 98.3% of the repository, and Rust is in the 0.1% of "others".
Rust is backwards compatible when you stick to stable features, but the kernel uses unstable features that can and do incur breaking changes.
-
Mark Russinovich: “Working towards enabling Windows driver development in Rust”
> 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.
-
The Linux Kernel Module Programming Guide
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?
-
The state of Flatpak security: major Projects are the worst?
Rust-for-Linux issue tracker
- rust devs in a nutshell
-
Rustproofing Linux (Part 1/4 Leaking Addresses)
Also, there already exists both issue: https://github.com/Rust-for-Linux/linux/issues/479
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.
-
how to compile a rust "hello world" with kernel 6.1?
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.
-
Rust in the 6.2 Kernel
> Also we’re bringing NPM style supply chain problems to the kernel now?
Nope. They've thought that through.
(In fact, cargo is only used to build test helpers. https://github.com/Rust-for-Linux/linux/blob/rust/Documentat...)
What are some alternatives?
jakt - The Jakt Programming Language
smartstring - Compact inlined strings for Rust.
gccrs - GCC Front-End for Rust
rfcs - RFCs for changes to Rust
dafny - Dafny is a verification-aware programming language
rustig - A tool to detect code paths leading to Rust's panic handler
koka - Koka language compiler and interpreter
PrawnOS - Libre Mainline Kernel and Debian for arm laptops
btleplug - Rust Cross-Platform Host-Side Bluetooth LE Access Library
c2rust - Migrate C code to Rust
rustc_codegen_gcc - libgccjit AOT codegen for rustc
Cargo - The Rust package manager