Linux Kernel Prepares Rust Toolchain Upgrade To v1.71

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Linux Kernel Prepares Rust Toolchain Upgrade To v1.71

Linux 6.5 upgraded its Rust toolchain against Rust 1.68.2. This was the first upgrade of the Rust toolchain from the original v1.62 requirements when the first Rust kernel code was mainlined. A second upgrade is now planned to take it to Rust 1.71...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Rust-1.71-Kernel-Upgrade

[tildearrow]

Typos:

The Linux kernel developers wokring on the Rust kernel integration plan...

...THis upgrade though did require some small kernel code changes.

[hf_139]

Rust was a mistake.
Linus became too weak.

[caligula]

Rust has really nice features compared to C/C++, but the policies related to tooling are insane. Kernel developers usually try to stick with a stable production ready GCC compiler which is multiple years old. Somehow the Rust compiler has to be the very latest, preferably an untested development version. What happened to stability? For example, compiling Firefox is a shitty experience thanks to this insane policy. Not all distros even ship with a recent enough compiler to compile any real applications.

[NobodyXu]

Rust has really nice features compared to C/C++, but the policies related to tooling are insane. Kernel developers usually try to stick with a stable production ready GCC compiler which is multiple years old. Somehow the Rust compiler has to be the very latest, preferably an untested development version. What happened to stability? For example, compiling Firefox is a shitty experience thanks to this insane policy. Not all distros even ship with a recent enough compiler to compile any real applications.

Stable Rust always guaranteed all stable features and stablised std library APIs to be backwards compatible.

Both Firefox and Linux kernel depends on nightly features and nightly APIs, thus they need to do this.
Once all the features required for Linux kernel are stablised, then Linux kernel can specified a minimal Rust version to support and not moving it for a really long time.

Many Rust libraries/applications using only stable features already have a MSRV (Minimum Supported Rust Version) where anything newer than that is supported.

[mether]

Rust has really nice features compared to C/C++, but the policies related to tooling are insane. Kernel developers usually try to stick with a stable production ready GCC compiler which is multiple years old. Somehow the Rust compiler has to be the very latest, preferably an untested development version. What happened to stability? For example, compiling Firefox is a shitty experience thanks to this insane policy. Not all distros even ship with a recent enough compiler to compile any real applications.

Kernel development in Rust is just incrementally developed because Linux developers don't want to review a large patch in one go. At this point there is just experimental Riust drivers, so there isn't a good reason to keep it pinned to a single version. C barely got any development and GCC releases often optimized for speed and broke existing code to do so because very few things in C was strictly defined and kernel because it was low level code was negatively impacted routinely. It was just easier to pin it a single version for much longer rather than deal with all that. Rust despite the frequent release schedule seems to have decent track record on not causing regressions for existing users via editions.

C++ is a bit different. For a while, it was similar to C and barely got any new development but in the recent years, there is a lot of new releases and sure enough, even enterprise distributions like RHEL have to ship with newer toolchain releases on a regular basis to keep up.

[dlq84]

Rust was a mistake.
Linus became too weak.

Poor trolling attempt, try again.

[bachchain]

Kernel developers usually try to stick with a stable production ready GCC compiler which is multiple years old. Somehow the Rust compiler has to be the very latest, preferably an untested development version. What happened to stability?

What is it about this specific point that causes people to forget how to read? The exact same comment happens every single time Linux oxidation is mentioned, even when it's specifically addressed in the article.

The Linux kernel developers wokring on the Rust kernel integration plan to continue to upgrade the Rust toolchain until reaching a minimum version of the toolchain where the necessary features have all been stabilized.

[caligula]

What is it about this specific point that causes people to forget how to read? The exact same comment happens every single time Linux oxidation is mentioned, even when it's specifically addressed in the article.

Rust is now 8 years old and still doesn't support the basic features e.g. Firefox needs in a stable manner. A pessimist might argue that it could take years before the language stabilizes enough.

[vextium]

Rust is now 8 years old and still doesn't support the basic features e.g. Firefox needs in a stable manner. A pessimist might argue that it could take years before the language stabilizes enough.

The Servo project would disagree with you