A Rust-for-Linux policy document

[Posted February 10, 2025 by corbet]

Miguel Ojeda has announced the posting of a new document describing policies around the use of Rust in the Linux kernel.

There has been a fair amount of confusion about what the kernel policies around Rust are, who maintains what and so on. This document tries to clarify some of these points with what, to the best of our knowledge, is the current status.

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Better if included in Linux repo itself

Posted Feb 11, 2025 8:48 UTC (Tue) by jorgegv (subscriber, #60484) [Link] (2 responses)

I believe it would be better if this document was included and maintained in the Linux source itself, just to avoid future comments about being an external document, etc.

This way, when two people argue in the future about the current Rust kernel policy, there would be a unique "true" text on which the conversation will be based. And also serve as the official kernel position.

Better if included in Linux repo itself

Posted Feb 12, 2025 20:23 UTC (Wed) by jmalcolm (subscriber, #8876) [Link]

Are you kidding? Have you seen how hard it is to get Rust stuff into the Linux tree? /s

Better if included in Linux repo itself

Posted Feb 15, 2025 8:06 UTC (Sat) by milesrout (subscriber, #126894) [Link]

Is this official Linux policy? Or is it the position of the R4L project? It seems inconsistent with what people have been saying on mailing lists that I have seen.

For example, people have been saying a lot that it doesnt matter if C changes break Rust code. But this document says:

>The usual kernel policy applies. So, by default, changes should not be introduced if they are known to break the build, including Rust.

and then goes on to describe exceptions in a way that suggests this will be tolerated only as a temporary stepping stone to the above approach being applied universally, eventually.

So which is it?