Greg Kroah-Hartman Sees ‘Tipping Point’ for Rust Drivers in Linux Kernel

Greg Kroah-Hartman points out that some upcoming changes in Linux 6.13 will make it possible to create “more” Rust-based core drivers. “This veteran core developer believes we are at a tipping point where we will see more upstream Rust drivers in the future,” Report Phoronix:

These Rust character/miscellaneous changes are on top of the major Rust pull for Linux 6.13, which brings 3k lines of code to provide more Rust infrastructure. Linux 6.13 also brings separately Rust archive abstraction.

“Sorry to do this at the end of the merge window,” Greg Kroah-Hartman said in pull requestexplaining that “meetings and holiday travel got in the way (hence the 5am pull request email…)”

There’s a lot here…

— Rust miscellaneous driver bindings and other Rust changes to make miscellaneous drivers really possible. I think this is a turning point and expect to see more Rust drivers moving forward now that these bindings exist.

The next merge window hopes that we can get the PCI and platform drivers working, which will completely enable almost all driver subsystems to start accepting (or at least getting) Rust drivers. This is the end result of a lot of work from many people, congratulations to them all for getting this far, you’ve proven a lot of us wrong in the best possible way with working code 🙂