Ubuntu Blog Talks Up Rust Schedulers, Potential For Micro-Kernel Design Future

Ubuntu/Canonical has for a while now promoted the prospects of Rust programming within the Linux kernel and one of their kernel engineers, Andrea Righi, wrote a Rust-written Linux scheduler with promising results that leverages eBPF for dynamically loading it at run-time. While Ubuntu isn't yet committing to using it as part of their distribution, appearing on the Ubuntu blog today was more praise for the work and even talking about the potential for a "micro-kernel design" in the future via leveraging Rust and eBPF.

Righi posted today on the Ubuntu blog around working on new Linux scheduler implementations using sched-ext for eBPF-loaded scheduler implementations, Rust, and Ubuntu. Beyond the developer advantages, the combination could yield end-user advantages like being able to load optimized schedulers based upon user workloads and other specialized cases depending upon the user.

The blog post goes on to note how "scx_rustland" can be utilized with Ubuntu 24.04 if desired via a PPA. This Rust scheduler work has shown to be a potentially viable alternative to the default EEVDF scheduler recently mainlined to the kernel.

The Ubuntu blog post concludes with:

"We are heading towards a micro-kernel design that has the potential to pave the way to certification on Linux: in the aforementioned scenario, if the user-space scheduler crashes, tasks will seamlessly transition to the default in-kernel scheduler, ensuring continuous system usability without any downtime.

This suggests that a similar approach could be used in other subsystems as well, allowing the Linux kernel to provide fully redundant and crash-safe systems."

While this is outside the scope of the upcoming Ubuntu 24.04 LTS release, it's rather intriguing to see these comments on the Ubuntu blog and at a time when Canonical has been ramping up their performance and engineering teams. It will be interesting to see what sort of innovations in this area they may be pursuing in the future with the scx_rustland work already proving quite interesting on its own. Interesting times ahead.