Rust-for-Linux Alternatives

Rust-for-Linux reviews and mentions

• Mark Russinovich: “Working towards enabling Windows driver development in Rust”
  7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 23 Sep 2023

  > 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

• The Linux Kernel Module Programming Guide
  2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 May 2023

  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?
  3 projects | /r/flatpak | 20 Feb 2023

  Rust-for-Linux issue tracker

• rust devs in a nutshell
  2 projects | /r/ProgrammerHumor | 14 Feb 2023
• Rustproofing Linux (Part 1/4 Leaking Addresses)
  2 projects | /r/rust | 10 Feb 2023

  Also, there already exists both issue: https://github.com/Rust-for-Linux/linux/issues/479

  2 projects | /r/rust | 10 Feb 2023

  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?
  2 projects | /r/rust | 23 Dec 2022

  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
  2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 18 Nov 2022

  > 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...)

• Asahi Lina on her experience writing a driver in rust
  4 projects | /r/linux | 5 Oct 2022

  The alloc library is available if a global allocator is available. Rust for Linux implements a global allocator (or, more accurately, hooks into the kernel's existing allocator, in rust/kernel/allocator.rs), and therefore you can use the alloc library in the Linux kernel.

• Rust for Linux officially merged
  7 projects | /r/programming | 4 Oct 2022

  Here's the tracking issue for unstable features used.

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