Linux 6.6 To Bring Another Rust Toolchain Upgrade

Miguel Ojeda who leads the "Rust for Linux" effort of integrating Rust programming language support into the Linux kernel has already submitted his pull request of planned feature updates for the upcoming Linux 6.6 cycle.

With Linux 6.5 there was the upgrade to the Rust 1.68.2 toolchain and for Linux 6.6 comes another upgrade to the Rust toolchain. The minimum Rust toolchain requirements will continue to be bumped until all of the necessary features are in place. This time it's an upgrade to the Rust 1.71.1 toolchain but Miguel Ojeda calls it a smaller jump compared to the prior toolchain upgrade. Meanwhile there are already patches floating on the kernel mailing list that in the future will bump it to Rust 1.72.

The Rust infrastructure updates for the Linux kernel also include upgrading to bindgen 0.65.1 as the first time they've upgraded the bindgen for the kernel.

Some of the other Rust changes for this imminent merge window include supporting the rust-analyzer for out-of-tree kernel modules, the Rust availability detection script has been improved, a new "paste!" proc macro, new pinned-init APIs, and a variety of other additions to continue to make Rust programming possibilities for the Linux kernel more robust.

So far no major Rust drivers have been submitted for inclusion to the mainline kernel but some remain in the works ike the Asahi Linux effort to provide a Rust-written Apple DRM kernel graphics driver.

The full list of Rust upgrades for Linux 6.6 can be found via this pull request.