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One Of The Rust Linux Kernel Maintainers Steps Down - Cites "Nontechnical Nonsense"
(www.phoronix.com)
this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2024
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Oof, that video... I don't have enough patience to put up with that sort of thing either. I wonder how plausible a complete Rust fork of the kernel would be.
That person in the audience was really grinding my gears. Just let the folks you're talking to answer you; no need to keep going on your diatribe when it's based on a false assumption and waste the whole room's time.
It sounds highly impractical, and it would probably introduce more issues than Rust solves, even if there were enough people with enough free time to do it. Any change must be evolutionary if it's going to be achievable.
NOT a fork of Linux, but Redox is aiming for a Unix-like OS based on Rust – but even with “source compatibility” with Linux/BSD and drivers being in userspace, my guess would be hardware drivers are still going to be a big speed bump
All you need nowadays for a decent Unix-like is compatibility with a handful of Linux softwares and a web browser. Hell, if you could get WINE working on your kernel you could maybe support as many Windows apps/games as Linux for free.
The big issue, as I see it, is performant drivers for a wide range of hardware. That doesn't come easy, but I wonder if that can be addressed in a way I'm too inexperienced to know.
But projects like Redox are a genuine threat to the hegemony of Linux - if memory safety isn't given the true recognition it deserves, projects like Redox serve to be the same disrupting force as Linux once was for UNIX.
You should do it. The Linux kernel is a C project. You can't change a 30-year project on a dime. Make your own project with Rust and hookers.
That's pretty well answered here: http://vger.kernel.org/lkml/#s15-3
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