[dist1ll]

I wonder how much of that is due to the kernel history, and the influence of C idioms, and not because of some inherent design superiority.

I'd be convinced once I see pure Rust kernels geared towards modern machines suddenly using linked lists everywhere. Otherwise I'm leaning towards it being a side-effect of the language choice and culture.

Also because I've seen the same kind of reasoning applied to compilers (e.g. "of course you need linked lists in compilers, they are extremely graph traversal heavy"). But one look at modern compilers implemented in Rust paint a very different picture, with index-based vectors, data-oriented design and flattened ASTs everywhere.

[cyberax]

Getting a general memory allocator working in kernel contexts is a hard task. You need to make sure it can't block and is re-enterable, that it doesn't result in fragmentation, and that it can be used from multiple threads.

It can be solved (or worked around), but it's understandable that people don't _want_ to do that.