Coders all around the world have been waiting for the Rust programming language to be incorporated into the Linux kernel. And now it is happening!
It’s settled: Linux can use Rust. The rollout has started. “Unless something unusual happens, it [Rust] will make it into 6.1,” Linus Torvalds, founder of Linux, claimed.
Coders all around the world have been waiting for the Rust programming language to be incorporated into the Linux kernel.
At the 2020 Linux Plumbers Conference, the idea of porting new Linux inline code to Rust first surfaced. To help develop Android, a Linux distribution, Google has advocated for Rust to be included in the Linux kernel since April 2021.
“We feel that Rust is now ready to join C as a viable language for building the kernel,” said Wedson Almeida Filho of Google’s Android Team at the time. It can help us keep the core kernel’s performance characteristics while decreasing the number of bugs and security flaws in privileged programmes.
Top Linux kernel developers were slow to come around. It was feared that unusual Rust additions would be necessary to make the language run on Linux. For instance, in order to implement the new Rust Linux NVMe driver, more than 70 Rust changes were required. On the other hand, Torvalds had previously told me, “We’ve been utilising exceptions to standard C for decades.”
At the exclusive Linux Kernel Maintainers Summit, this was still a problem. However, it was ultimately judged that Rust has sufficient support in Clang, the front-end compiler for the C language family, to proceed. After all, as Torvalds has previously stated, “Clang does work, so incorporating Rust would presumably improve and not hinder the kernel.”
Torvalds stated, “There was disagreement during the Maintainers Summit, but it was really largely about the issue of compiler versions. That Rust already knew!
Thanks largely to Miguel Ojeda, who has worked on both the Linux kernel and Rust, Rust has matured considerably on Linux, which is a major plus for the language. Furthermore, Western Digital Principal Engineer Andreas Hindborg demonstrated at the 2022 Linux Plumbers Summit that an SSD NVM-Express (NVMe) driver for Linux could be written in Rust. The Linux developers were persuaded that Rust was ready for prime time. In a nutshell, they all agreed that it was time to get to work with Rust on Linux.
Torvalds cautions that this initial version of Rust will only feature the core infrastructure. Nevertheless, this is a huge initial step for both Rust and Linux.
