Re: [RFC] Should we consider to re-write HFS/HFS+ in Rust?

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de>]

Hi Slava,

On Tue, 2025-05-27 at 23:39 +0000, Viacheslav Dubeyko wrote:
> One idea crossed my mind recently. And this is about re-writing HFS/HFS+ in
> Rust. It could be interesting direction but I am not sure how reasonable it
> could be. From one point of view, HFS/HFS+ are not critical subsystems and we
> can afford some experiments. From another point of view, we have enough issues
> in the HFS/HFS+ code and, maybe, re-working HFS/HFS+ can make the code more
> stable.
> 
> I don't think that it's a good idea to implement the complete re-writing of the
> whole driver at once. However, we need a some unification and generalization of
> HFS/HFS+ code patterns in the form of re-usable code by both drivers. This re-
> usable code can be represented as by C code as by Rust code. And we can
> introduce this generalized code in the form of C and Rust at the same time. So,
> we can re-write HFS/HFS+ code gradually step by step. My point here that we
> could have C code and Rust code for generalized functionality of HFS/HFS+ and
> Kconfig would define which code will be compiled and used, finally.
> 
> How do you feel about this? And can we afford such implementation efforts?

I am generally not opposed to rustifying parts of the Linux kernel. However, I
would still postpone such efforts into the future until the Rust frontend in
GCC has become usable on all architectures supported by the kernel such that
rustifying a kernel module does not result in it becoming unusable on architectures
without a native rustc compiler.

Adrian

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