Rust UEFI Firmware Targets Promoted To Tier-2 Status

Back in September was a proposal to promote Rust's UEFI firmware targets to tier-2. With the current tier-3 designation the Rust UEFI targets they currently lack continuous integration (CI) guarantees and official builds in the Rust release channels, which means users wanting to use Rust for targeting the UEFI binaries need to rely on nightly/unstable compiler builds.

David Rheinsberg of Red Hat was the one to pursue promoting of the Rust UEFI firmware targets to make it easier to build Rust UEFI applications. That proposal was successful and the Rust team has now accepted promoting the AArch64 / i686 / x86_64 UEFI targets to tier-2 status. This means moving forward there will be automatic builds in the Rust release channels and automatic CI builds. This in turn lowers the barrier for using the Rust programming language for UEFI development efforts.

Among open-source software today already working with Rust for UEFI development is an experimental core of TianoCore EDK2 to Rust, td-shim Rust UEFI support for confidential containers, Cloud Hypervisor has a Rust-based minimal UEFI firmware implementation, and various UEFI-related Crates.

As of this morning the Rust compiler team has now accepted the change proposal for raising the UEFI targets to tier-2 status moving forward.

It's been quite an eventful year for Rust with the initial Rust infrastructure arriving with the Linux 6.1 kernel, initial work showing Rust Linux drivers can be as fast as C drivers, Mesa 22.3 picking up initial Rust code in the form of the successful Rusticl OpenCL implementation, BUS1 working on r-linux as a Rust capability-based Linux runtime, GCC Rust likely coming with GCC 13, uutils as a Rust Coreutils implementation becoming more practical, and many other milestones for this increasingly popular system programming language.