Re: [TECH TOPIC] Rust for Linux

Sasha Levin
2021-07-06T20:47:05Z

On Tue, Jul 06, 2021 at 05:33:42PM +0200, Miguel Ojeda wrote:
>On Tue, Jul 6, 2021 at 5:03 PM Sasha Levin <sashal@kernel.org> wrote:
>>
>> Does this mean that anyone who wishes to modify these C APIs must also
>> know Rust to fix up those abstractions too?
>
>Please see my answer to James and Leon, i.e. if we have abstractions
>for a particular subsystem, it should mean somebody is happy to write,
>use and maintain them.

I strongly disagree. If we have abstractions for a particular subsystem
all it means that someone at some point did that work, nothing more than
that.

That someone might have moved on, working elsewhere, retired, etc, and
those abstractions are living orphaned in the kernel.

>That means that, yes, for subsystems that have Rust abstractions, if
>you want to touch the C API, you also need to do so for the Rust
>abstractions. But for any heavy refactor, I would expect maintainers
>being the ones doing it, or at least helping to do so if somebody else
>wants to change something in the C side and does not know how to
>update the Rust side.

That's quite an ask. If the driver work goes in and I want to touch the
driver API, I need to get Greg KH to write code for me?

--
Thanks,
Sasha