Ask HN: How is Rust used in the Linux kernel today?

• linux

  30 2,100 0.0 C

  Linux kernel source tree (by AsahiLinux)

  

I am using Asahi Linux and the GPU driver works great, it even supports OpenGL 3.1 (https://asahilinux.org/2023/06/opengl-3-1-on-asahi-linux/). Definitely not alpha, I would say it's close to a "release candidate". Many bugs got resolved, nothing much left (besides newer OpenGL and Vulkan of course, but current state is very stable): https://github.com/AsahiLinux/linux/issues/72

• linux

  981 170,551 10.0 C

  Linux kernel source tree

There's been 1500+ commits since 2020 on the 'main' Kernel fork that has Rust support [0]. Many of them through collaboration and backs and forths of review (look at the PRs on the fork).

My understanding is that the `rust-next` branch represents what's ready for Linus to merge. So there's a whole lot that's not in there, which you're missing in your evaluation.

Last year a Kernel dev from Western Digital wrote an NVME driver in Rust [1] (look at slides 15 & 16) which I would consider to be qualified and knowledgeable.

I wouldn't measure the effort solely on what's been merged to mainline as there's been 6 merge windows from 6.1 to now. Many of those commits are laying the groundwork for the next few years.

[0] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/compare/master...Rust-for-...

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com featured

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

Suggest a related project