During the ongoing Maintainers Summit conference, the results of an experiment involving the addition of support for developing components in the Rust language to the Linux kernel were discussed. The participants at the conference acknowledged the experiment as a success and collectively decided to elevate the Rust language support to the status of a core component of the kernel, thereby removing its experimental label.
Three years ago, the ability to develop drivers and modules in Rust was introduced in the 6.1 kernel. This milestone marked the inclusion of abstractions for developing drivers for GPUs, file systems, block devices, network adapters, and USB devices in Rust. Projects such as Nova for NVIDIA GPUs, asahi for Apple AGX GPUs, Tyr for ARM Mali GPUs, and rust_ext2 for the Ext2 FS are currently being developed in Rust. Additionally, an implementation of IPC Binder in Rust is part of the core. The RROS project is also actively working on a real-time subsystem for the Linux kernel using Rust.
It is worth noting that Rust support in the Linux kernel is not enabled by default and does not necessitate the inclusion of Rust as a required kernel build dependency. This flexible approach allows developers to leverage Rust’s capabilities within the kernel while maintaining a degree of optional usage.