Re: Rust kernel policy

Jarkko Sakkinen
2025-02-20T08:16:15Z

On Thu, 2025-02-20 at 10:13 +0200, Jarkko Sakkinen wrote:
> On Wed, 2025-02-19 at 12:52 -0800, Bart Van Assche wrote:
> > On 2/19/25 12:46 PM, Steven Rostedt wrote:
> > > I do feel that new drivers written in Rust would help with the
> > > vulnerabilities that new drivers usually add to the kernel.
> >
> > For driver developers it is easier to learn C than to learn Rust.
> > I'm
> > not sure that all driver developers, especially the "drive by"
> > developers, have the skills to learn Rust.
>
> IMHO, Rust is not that difficult to learn but it is difficult to
> run.
>
> One point of difficulty for me still is the QA part, not really the
> code. QuickStart discusses on how to install all the shenanigans
> with distribution package managers.
>
> The reality of actual kernel development is that you almost never
> compile/run host-to-host, rendering that part of the documentation
> in the battlefield next to useless.
>
> Instead it should have instructions for BuildRoot, Yocto and
> perhaps NixOS (via podman). It should really explain this instead
> of dnf/apt-get etc.

If I got a Rust patch for review cycle, I would not have any idea
what to do with it. And I'm talking about writing a single line of
code but how to put that patch into a QA cycle (personally using
BR for this, which is somewhat popular choice among kernel
maintainers).

So I would put "NAK because cannot test this".

BR, Jarkko