Ubuntu Talks Up Rust Kernel Programming Potential With Ubuntu 23.04

[Michael]

Strange question maybe, but does anyone know what the monospaced font is in the code image in the posting? Looks nice, have issues with some of them out there.

Consolas

[marlock]

no offense Michael but they actually advertise Ubuntu using Rust Kernel Programming and Michael just did and advertise to ubuntu

I honestly don't think Michael helped Ubuntu gain a more positive outlook from this post...

He basically argued that everyone trying to do what Canonical says Ubuntu 23.04 will let them do is better served by newer kernel that 23.04 won't ever have available from Canonical, so it won't help beyond "hello world"-grade software

I know marketing folk are nuts, but how's that an ad?

edit:
Did Canonical say anything about using that Rust support on Ubuntu itself, or is this really just "we're gonna switch this kernel compile flag on in Ubuntu kernels"?

edit 2:
Is linux kernel Rust still limited to being compilable in a couple architectures? or is the compiler support also evolving to let Rust kernel pieces be used in all architectures supported by the linux kernel? this was mentioned in another thread and seems like the biggest hurdle for widespread usage of Rust in the kernel once basic enablement is done

[jacob]

edit 2:
Is linux kernel Rust still limited to being compilable in a couple architectures? or is the compiler support also evolving to let Rust kernel pieces be used in all architectures supported by the linux kernel? this was mentioned in another thread and seems like the biggest hurdle for widespread usage of Rust in the kernel once basic enablement is done

Rust doesn't officially support all the architectures that Linux runs on so yes, it's limited and will be for the foreseeable future. That's also one of the reasons why Rust code is only accepted for drivers and other "leaf modules". In some cases it may be possible to get things to work unofficially by rebuilding the Rust compiler to use the appropriate LLVM backend, but such setups are unsupported, untested and obviously not recommended for the kernel of all things.

On the other hand, in the real world, production deployments nowadays run on amd64, Aarch64, Power and that's pretty much it. Those architectures are of course supported.

[ehansin]

Consolas

Thanks Michael! Fonts on Linux have gotten so much better on Linux the last so many years. No need to fiddle with config files, etc. to override patent encumbered settings, etc. Small wins add up!

[Barnacle]

Zig has managed to do something truly unique. It has convinced me that JavaScript actually has pretty decent syntax in comparison. It's truly astounding that someone, presumably with some amount of experience, looked at C and came to the conclusion that

const std = @import("std");

pub fn main() !void
{
const stdout = std.io.getStdOut().writer();
try stdout.print("Hello, {s}!\n", .{"world"});
}

was an improvement

I was thinking the same thing about the Rust Hello World kernel module in the article. Some of the C code in the kernel is pretty nasty and poorly structured, but every time I forget what Rust looks like and get curious, I immediately see something that makes me say "no thanks".

[onlyLinuxLuvUBack]

Ubuntu shiny-new-istas ? they should add python 3 kernel modules. its what the @cool kids(use).

[lowflyer]

Ubuntu shiny-new-istas ? they should add python 3 kernel modules. its what the @cool kids(use).

Yay! but also Ruby, PHP or even Visual Basic would be fun to make kernel modules with.

[hyperchaotic]

As I already wrote at

https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/phoronix/site-discussion/1380961-new-amd-ryzen-cpus-intel-sapphire-rapids-rust-adoption-more-in-q1#post1380975

I would prefer Zig over Rust.

With Rust the Linux kernel will become fat and slow.
And it will be lesser secure then with Zig.

Well, Rust won’t be used in the kernel itself, only for modules and so far the proof of concept NVMe driver and the AGX driver for Apple silicon have proven to be “C level performant”.

In fact the AGX driver+Mesa outperforms Apples own in OGL tests, though that’s not because of the language but because it’s well written and utilizes the GPU effectively. But it proves Rust is performant.

Perhaps you can provide some more specific details on how it will make Linux fat and slow?

[Alexmitter]

Is linux kernel Rust still limited to being compilable in a couple architectures

x86/x86_64 and Aarch64 are the only ones well supported by the rust compiler. Even with Riscv which just works on GCC, it struggles hard to compile anything which is why Firefox is still very hard to obtain on riscv.

[hyperchaotic]

It would be really interesting to hear from tradicional Linux module developers that try the Rust support for some time and share their experience.

Yes there’s not much yet. We have two: The proof of concept NVMe driver (Andreas Hindborg of Western Digital) and the AGX driver for Apple silicon (Asahi Lina is a very experienced developer in the kernel space, even if only dealing with AGX on her stream) and they have both shared their experiences on the subject.

It’ll be interesting to see what comes next, once there’s more support in the kernel. It will trickle in bit by bit over this year.