CommunityNews

CommunityNews

Rust in the Linux kernel

In our previous post, we announced that Android now supports the Rust programming language for developing the OS itself. Related to this, we are also participating in the effort to evaluate the use of Rust as a supported language for developing the Linux kernel. In this post, we discuss some technical aspects of this work using a few simple examples.

C has been the language of choice for writing kernels for almost half a century because it offers the level of control and predictable performance required by such a critical component. Density of memory safety bugs in the Linux kernel is generally quite low due to high code quality, high standards of code review, and carefully implemented safeguards. However, memory safety bugs do still regularly occur. On Android, vulnerabilities in the kernel are generally considered high-severity because they can result in a security model bypass due to the privileged mode that the kernel runs in.

We feel that Rust is now ready to join C as a practical language for implementing the kernel. It can help us reduce the number of potential bugs and security vulnerabilities in privileged code while playing nicely with the core kernel and preserving its performance characteristics…

This thread was posted by one of our members via one of our news source trackers.

Where Next?

Popular Linux topics Top

First poster: bot
The Year of the Linux Desktop. The year of the Linux desktop has arrived. This is a guide for how to improve the Linux desktop experienc...
New
First poster: bot
It looks like thanks to AMD’s increasing sales and continuing successes in the enterprise space with more HPC wins and the like, AMD is h...
New
First poster: bot
In our previous post, we announced that Android now supports the Rust programming language for developing the OS itself. Related to this,...
New
First poster: bot
On Wed, Apr 14, 2021 at 11:46 AM ojeda@kernel.org wrote: Some of you have noticed the past few weeks and months that a serious attempt...
New
First poster: AstonJ
In a few weeks, Fedora 34 will be released, and alongside it - you will get to use Gnome 40, the next version of this namesake desktop en...
New
First poster: bot
Thirty years ago, Linus Torvalds was a 21 year old student at the University of Helsinki when he first released the Linux Kernel. His ann...
New
CommunityNews
As movement toward memory-safe languages, and Rust in particular, continues to grow, it is worth looking at one of the larger scale effor...
New
First poster: kokolegorille
Someone might need to check on Steve Ballmer. Microsoft has developed its own Linux distro, CBL-Mariner, and released it under the open s...
New
First poster: bot
In my previous article “Why you should migrate everything from Linux to BSD” part 1 and part 2 I addressed some of the “political issues”...
New
Eiji
Hi, I have found a helpful video today. Discord is one of the most popular chat apps. However it’s updater on Linux actually causes more ...
New

Other popular topics Top

ohm
Which, if any, games do you play? On what platform? I just bought (and completed) Minecraft Dungeons for my Nintendo Switch. Other than ...
New
AstonJ
Or looking forward to? :nerd_face:
483 11975 256
New
Exadra37
I am thinking in building or buy a desktop computer for programing, both professionally and on my free time, and my choice of OS is Linux...
New
AstonJ
You might be thinking we should just ask who’s not using VSCode :joy: however there are some new additions in the space that might give V...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Build highly interactive applications without ever leaving Elixir, the way the experts do. Let LiveView take care of performance, scalabi...
New
mafinar
This is going to be a long an frequently posted thread. While talking to a friend of mine who has taken data structure and algorithm cou...
New
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Develop, deploy, and debug BEAM applications using BEAMOps: a new paradigm that focuses on scalability, fault tolerance, and owning each ...
New
AstonJ
If you’re getting errors like this: psql: error: connection to server on socket “/tmp/.s.PGSQL.5432” failed: No such file or directory ...
New
AstonJ
Curious what kind of results others are getting, I think actually prefer the 7B model to the 32B model, not only is it faster but the qua...
New