Re: [PATCH v2 3/3] net: phy: add Rust Rockchip PHY driver

Miguel Ojeda
2024-02-01T23:12:17Z

On Thu, Feb 1, 2024 at 10:30 PM Andrew Lunn <andrew@lunn.ch> wrote:
>
> As one of the PHY Maintainers, i would say no.
>
> Now we have an example, i think we should be a lot more strict about
> what we actually merge. It should be a driver for hardware which does
> not have a C driver.

Yeah, a single "Rust reference driver" is likely enough to give a good
example of how things would look.

I guess more than one could be justified if there are significant
differences, e.g. if the maintainers want to cover more of the
abstractions API for some reason.

> We cannot drop C drivers since Rust at the moment does not support all
> architectures GCC/Clang does. PHY drivers are architecture
> independent, and in real life used on multiple architectures. When
> Rust eventually catches up, we could consider dropping C drivers when
> there is an equivalent Rust driver, but from what i hear, that is a
> few years away. I don't want to be supporting a C and Rust driver for
> the same hardware.

The `rustc_codegen_gcc` backend can already build the kernel without
changes, so hopefully we will see some results sooner than that. If we
are talking multiple years, GCC Rust likely enters the equation too.

But, indeed, there is a lot of work to do until we can drop C code in general.

Cheers,
Miguel