Re: Rust kernel policy

Paul E. McKenney
2025-02-20T22:08:34Z

On Thu, Feb 20, 2025 at 09:57:29AM +0100, Martin Uecker wrote:
> Am Donnerstag, dem 20.02.2025 um 08:10 +0100 schrieb Greg KH:
> > On Thu, Feb 20, 2025 at 08:03:02AM +0100, Martin Uecker wrote:
> > > Am Mittwoch, dem 19.02.2025 um 06:39 +0100 schrieb Greg KH:
> > > > On Tue, Feb 18, 2025 at 07:04:59PM -0800, Boqun Feng wrote:
> > > > > On Tue, Feb 18, 2025 at 04:58:27PM -0800, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> > > > > [...]
> > > > > > > >
> > > ...
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > I'm all for moving our C codebase toward making these types of problems
> > > > impossible to hit, the work that Kees and Gustavo and others are doing
> > > > here is wonderful and totally needed, we have 30 million lines of C code
> > > > that isn't going anywhere any year soon. That's a worthy effort and is
> > > > not going to stop and should not stop no matter what.
> > >
> > > It seems to me that these efforts do not see nearly as much attention
> > > as they deserve.
> >
> > What more do you think needs to be done here? The LF, and other
> > companies, fund developers explicitly to work on this effort. Should we
> > be doing more, and if so, what can we do better?
>
> Kees communicates with the GCC side and sometimes this leads to
> improvements, e.g. counted_by (I was peripherily involved in the
> GCC implementation). But I think much much more could be done,
> if there was a collaboration between compilers, the ISO C working
> group, and the kernel community to design and implement such
> extensions and to standardize them in ISO C.
>
> >
> > > I also would like to point out that there is not much investments
> > > done on C compiler frontends (I started to fix bugs in my spare time
> > > in GCC because nobody fixed the bugs I filed), and the kernel
> > > community also is not currently involved in ISO C standardization.
> >
> > There are kernel developers involved in the C standard committee work,
> > one of them emails a few of us short summaries of what is going on every
> > few months. Again, is there something there that you think needs to be
> > done better, and if so, what can we do?
> >
> > But note, ISO standards work is really rough work, I wouldn't recommend
> > it for anyone :)
>
> I am a member of the ISO C working group. Yes it it can be painful, but
> it is also interesting and people a generally very nice.
>
> There is currently no kernel developer actively involved, but this would
> be very helpful.
>
> (Paul McKenney is involved in C++ regarding atomics and Miguel is
> also following what we do.)

Sadly, I must pick my battles extremely carefully. So additional people
from the Linux-kernel community being involved in standards work would
be a very good thing from my viewpoint.

Thanx, Paul