The Rust for Linux project, sponsored by Google, has advanced with use of a beta Rust compiler (as opposed to a nightly build), testing ARM and RISC-V architecture support, new Rust abstractions, and more.
A new set of patches submitted to the Linux kernel mailing list summarises the progress of the project to enable Rust to be used alongside C for implementing the Linux kernel. The progress is significant.
Project leader Miguel Ojeda is a computer scientist at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, now working full time on Rust for Linux. In his post, he begun by explaining that infallible allocations have been removed via a customised “alloc” standard library crate. An infallible allocation is where the developer assumes that an allocation of memory will always succeed. If it does not succeed, Rust terminates the process. Infallible allocations are not acceptable in the kernel since failures cause a kernel panic. A fallible allocation lets the developer test for success.
“Eventually, the goal is to have everything the kernel needs in upstream ‘alloc’ and drop it from the kernel tree,” he said.
Rust for Linux requires new features in the Rust compiler (rustc) as…
