Rust For The Linux Kernel Updated, Uutils As Rust Version Of Coreutils Updated Too

While not marked as a pull request yet for mainlining to the kernel, Miguel Ojeda this morning sent out an updated set of patches adding in the Rust programming language support for the Linux kernel. Separately, a new version of Uutils was released this weekend as the Rust language implementation of GNU Coreutils.

Miguel Ojeda sent out the seventh iteration of the Rust patches for the Linux kernel that add in the infrastructure for building Rust code in the kernel, adding various abstractions for use by the Rust code, and also some sample code for demonstrating how this memory-safe programming language can be used in kernel space. The Rust for Linux kernel effort continues to see much industry interest in large part for security reasons in trying to improve code safety.

With the v7 patches of Rust for Linux, various comments raised by the prior round of code review were addressed. There is also adding of SPDX license identifiers to more of the Rust code, UML x86_64 support for KUnit, documentation updates, and additional reviewed-by/acked-by tags.

This patch series seems to be settling down and consensus being reached about it, so possibly before long we'll see this code mainlined to the kernel or at least worked into the staging area. Building the Rust components for the Linux kernel will remain optional for the foreseeable future.

See the v7 patches for more details on these latest changes that add more than 37.6k lines of new code to the kernel.

Separately, on Sunday was the release of Uutils 0.0.14 as the Rust-written replacement to GNU Coreutils. This new version fixes Android support and has many fixes and compatibility improvements throughout for contained commands like mv / chown / df / cp / mkdir / stat and other common Coreutils utilities.