Using Rust for kernel development

Posted Sep 30, 2021 0:03 UTC (Thu) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784)
In reply to: Using Rust for kernel development by lwnli
Parent article: Using Rust for kernel development

Writing in Rust turns many kinds of memory safety violation into compile-time errors, meaning that you have to fix them before you can start testing the code.

Running in user-space turns some subset of memory safety violations, which partially overlap with those that Rust turns into compile-time errors, into SIGSEGVs instead of kernel data structure corruption.

Using Rust for kernel development

Posted Sep 30, 2021 0:06 UTC (Thu) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

(And, of course, it turns the rest into process-local data structure corruption. Which could still be disastrous when the program has control of a DMA-capable peripheral device and your IOMMU capabilities are insufficient...)