The Linux Kernel Module Programming Guide

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  • Rust-for-Linux

    Adding support for the Rust language to the Linux kernel. (by Rust-for-Linux)

    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?

  • linux

    Linux kernel source tree (by AsahiLinux)

    There aren't really any non-trivial mainline modules, since the Rust support is so new. There's the non-mainline Asahi M1 GPU driver though! It will eventually be mainlined, but IIRC some more Rust support code needs to be mainlined first.

    https://github.com/AsahiLinux/linux/tree/asahi/drivers/gpu/d...

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