[ilovecaching]

I work on the kernel for a living, and I find this claim exceedingly dubious. We're currently talking about experimentally supporting modules written in Rust, which is an entirely different beast than replacing pieces of the kernel core. The barrier to entry for drivers is significantly lower, and driver quality can be much, much poorer than the quality of the core kernel. Many parts of the kernel have been fine tuned for decades, and many of the kernel developers that maintain Linux are also C experts (myself included) who aren't going to slow down development to migrate working code to Rust. It's great that we can experiment and see how Rust goes for driver authors, but they are still bus API consumers, not core kernel.

[tialaramex]

As I understand it the crucial rationale for drivers is that drivers were anyway necessarily platform dependent which undoes one argument against Rust.

Today Rust does not overlap Linux in terms of platform support. There are (small but very much alive) communities doing Linux on architectures that Rust has no support for and in some cases has no plans ever to support. So this makes drivers the only case where choosing Rust doesn't mean some people lose out, as a platform e.g. with no PCI bus doesn't get to run PCI drivers even if they were written in C.

I expect that over the next say, five to ten years, two things will happen to greatly improve this, maybe to the point where you absolutely could rewrite core Linux code in Rust if you wanted to. Firstly, Rust will get more platform support. Linux doesn't really need Rust's "Tier 1" (Linus doesn't check every kernel release passes tests on all real Linux target hardware as I understand it) but clearly you want Rust to at least build and take patches for every Linux platform some day. Secondly, some older platforms will "rust out". If your community is nursing 30+ year old hardware and increasingly more maintenance work is shared between fewer shoulders at some point "Linux-next" is not a priority and your platform will stop being supported while effort moves to exciting new hardware.

[sophacles]

There's active work being done on the rust gcc backend and it's progressing nicely. That should help with some of the platform concerns you (rightly) raised.

[rrdharan]

> Today Rust does not overlap Linux in terms of platform support.

Nit, I believe actually the Rust and Linux platform sets would be considered "overlapping sets" in the mathematical sense :), since neither is a subset of the other.

e.g. Rust platforms include things like the NetBSD Rump Kernel and Redox and I think one would be hard-pressed to claim that Linux supports those as platforms.

https://doc.xuwenliang.com/docs/rust/1423

[MYEUHD]

>I work on the kernel for a living

I'm interested in kernel development and I like the idea of working on it for a living. Can you give more details about your job? What does it consist in? Is it mostly code-review? Or are you responsible for maintaining a part of the kernel. Who is the entity that pays you, and what are the criteria they'd use to pay a new contributor to work on kernel full-time? Finally, can you point me to beginner-friendly things to work on to get started? how do I know which part of the kernel I should study and contribute to?