Rust Programming Language To Land in Linux Kernel 6.1
In a recent post on the Linux Kernel mailing list, Linus Torvalds promised “a pretty core number of new features” for the Linux kernel. (opens in new tab) 6.1, and the first one seems to have appeared: reportedly register (opens in new tab)the Rust programming language is directly supported in the OS.
This news is not entirely unexpected, as a patch was released some time ago to add Rust to Linux. Version 9 is coming in August 2022. At the recent Open Source Summit, Torvalds’ keynote indicated that we should expect Rust to arrive in 6.1.Rust currently has developer group We’re working on Linux kernel support, and we see the first steps towards its inevitable arrival in 6.1 in a pull request created by Kees Cook and approved by Torvalds on October 1st.
Adding Rust support adds about 12,500 lines of code to the Linux kernel. The Linux kernel itself is written in C and has some interoperability with Rust. However, GCC, the Gnu Compiler Collection, cannot compile new languages, and Clang, which can compile, has its own drawbacks if you want to write code for architectures other than x86 and Arm. With Rust set to receive official Linux support and a community of enthusiastic kernel hackers, it’s only a matter of time before Rust becomes available on more architectures. The new kernel is expected to be available from his December of this year.
Some developers have already started showing what they can do with Rust on Linux, and Andreas Hindborg, principal engineer at Western Digital, announced at the 2022 Linux Plumbers Summit that an NVMe SSD for Linux written in Rust showed off the driver. linux rust.
rust (opens in new tab) is a general-purpose programming language that was created in 2006 under the influence of C++ and reached version 1.0 in 2015. Born out of a personal project by Mozilla employee Graydon Hoare, in 2020 he was sponsored by Mozilla until the company was reshuffled by Covid. The pandemic has led to the formation of the Rust Foundation in 2021. Amazon Web Services, Huawei, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla currently support the foundation, with Google supporting Rust in his Android open source project. The language is notable for its elegance, his zero-tolerance approach to memory safety, and the speed at which it grows in popularity.
Also known as a high-performance language, it was created to combine the flexible syntax of high-level languages with the hardware control and speed of low-level languages. Parallelism is also one of its strengths, and it has strong memory safety. In particular, C# and Java do not have a built-in garbage collector that returns memory that is no longer referenced by the program to the system. Memory errors caused by C programmers can be a thing of the past with Rust’s memory safe features.