Comment by lmm

2 days ago

> What about legacy systems, which may not have a rust toolchain?

Linux's attitude has always been either you keep up or you get dropped - see the lack of any stable driver API and the ruthless pruning of unmaintained drivers.

> What about new architectures that may come up in the future?

Who's to say they won't have a Rust compiler? Who's to say they will have a C one?

2 comments

lmm

cwillu 1 day ago

> Linux's attitude has always been either you keep up or you get dropped

Gonna need a citation on that one. Drivers are removed when they don't have users anymore, and a user piping up is enough to keep the driver in the tree:

For example:

   > As suggested by both Greg and Jakub, let's remove the ones that look
   > are most likely to have no users left and also get in the way of the
   > wext cleanup. If anyone is still using any of these, we can revert the
   > driver removal individually.

https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20231030071922.233080-1-glaubit...

Or the x32 platform removal proposal, which didn't happen against after some users showed up:

   > > > I'm seriously considering sending a patch to remove x32 support from
   > > > upstream Linux.  Here are some problems with it:
   > >
   > > Apparently the main real use case is for extreme benchmarking. It's
   > > the only use-case where the complexity of maintaining a whole
   > > development environment and distro is worth it, it seems. Apparently a
   > > number of Spec submissions have been done with the x32 model.
   > >
   > > I'm not opposed to trying to sunset the support, but let's see who complains..
   >
   > I'm just a single user. I do rely on it though, FWIW.
   > […snipped further discussion]

https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAPmeqMrVqJm4sqVgSLqJnmaVC5iakj...

rat87 2 days ago

Linux also cant be built by any minimal c compiler for obscure arch, it requires many gcc extensions. Its only because llvm added them that its also can be compiled with llvm