Comment by wewewedxfgdf
2 days ago
Community and people are the main issue.
If the people who work on the kernel now don't like that direction then that's a big problem.
The Linux leadership don't seem very focused on the people issues.
Where is the evidence that there is buy in from the actual people doing kernel development now?
Or is it just Linus and Greg as commanders saying "thou shalt".
Plenty of Linux maintainers are either fully or partially on board with using Rust in drivers. Don't overindex on the opinions of two or three of them that are vocally opposed / skeptical.
Christian is a special case because his subsystem (DMA) is essentially required for the vast majority of useful device drivers that one might want to write. Whereas other subsystems are allowed to go at their own pace, being completely blocked on DMA access by the veto of one salty maintainer would effectively doom the whole R4L project. So whereas normally Linus would be more willing to avoid stepping on any maintainer's toes, he kind of has to here.
I guess I simply don't understand why he's biased against rust folks using his API as long as they aren't mucking about on his lawn. Why does he care? If the API and calling conventions are adhered to it makes absolutely no difference to him or the hardware that it's running on. I don't understand his objections. If I write a c library or network service, I don't care if the person using it is using rust, c, ada, or cobol...
Linus appears to agree
https://lore.kernel.org/rust-for-linux/1f52fa44062e9395d54ed...
To play devil's advocate:
1. He has a philosophical objection to a multi-lingual kernel, because it adds complexity, and it's not unreasonable to expect that to spread. 2. It's fair enough to say it doesn't impact him now. But realistically if Rust is a success and goes beyond an experiment then at some point (e.g. in a decade) it will become untenable for subsystem maintainers to break the rust bindings with changes and let someone else fix them before releases. I fully expect that there will be very important drivers written in Rust in the future and it will be too disruptive to have the Rust build break on a regular basis just because Hellwig doesn't want to deal with it every time the DMA APIs are changed.
So unsurprisingly Hellwig is reacting now, at the point when he can exert the most control to avoid being forced to either accept working on doing some Rust himself or be forced to step aside and let someone else do it.
However this isn't realistically good enough. Linus already called the play when he merged the initial Rust stuff, the experiment gets to go on. The time to disagree and commit was back then.
> Where is the evidence that there is buy in from the actual people doing kernel development now?
Are the people doing the work not good enough? See the maintainers list -- Miguel Ojeda, Alex Gaynor, Boqun Feng, Gary Guo, Björn Roy Baron, Benno Lossin, Andreas Hindborg, Alice Ryhl, Trevor Gross, Danilo Krummrich, etc., etc...
Who else exactly do you want to buy in?
> If the people who work on the kernel now don't like that direction then that's a big problem.
I think if you really want to lead/fight a counter-revolution, it will come down to effort. If you don't like Rust for Linux (for what could be a completely legitimate reason), then you need to show how it is wrongheaded.
Like -- reverse engineer an M1 GPU or some other driver, and show how it can be done better with existing tooling.
What I don't think you get to do is wait and do nothing and complain.
Another ”people perspective” point is the aging demograph of the kernel devs and the need to engage a new generation of devs. Betting on a modern language like rust might just be what’s needed on that note. And, according to Torvalds they have the folks willing to do the work today.
Is that a job for kernel folks to address or companies who hire people to work on the Linux kernel?
> Where is the evidence that there is buy in from the actual people doing kernel development now?
https://lwn.net/Articles/1007921/
> To crudely summarize: the majority of responses thought that the inclusion of Rust in the Linux kernel was a good thing; the vast majority thought that it was inevitable at this point, whether or not they approved.