A first look at Rust in the 6.1 kernel

Posted Oct 14, 2022 14:25 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: A first look at Rust in the 6.1 kernel by amarao
Parent article: A first look at Rust in the 6.1 kernel

> As a Rust lover I want to see the ability to build a kernel module with minimal amount of kernel stuff. If I need to put few bits into GPIO and create few entries for /sys, why should I dive deep into kernel build details?

Because, unfortunately, the kernel build system is over 30 years old, a mess, and has accumulated masses of technical debt? From what I've heard, that's not much of an exaggeration, if any ... and fair a few people have tried to fix it with varying degrees of success, but not really that much.

Sounds like you're not volunteering to make it easy for others to do what you want to do ...

I wish we had a simple "what hardware do you have" style config that you could just say "this is my processor, this is my mobo, these are my add-in cards", and it configured everything for you. The feedback I've got basically is "you'll need to rewrite pretty much everything ...". I hope things have improved, but I doubt it ...

Cheers,
Wol

A first look at Rust in the 6.1 kernel

Posted Oct 14, 2022 18:41 UTC (Fri) by willy (subscriber, #9762) [Link]

This really isn't true. Depending what you're complaining about, Kconfig is twenty years old, not thirty. Roman Zippel rewrote it in 2002. The Makefiles were moved to their current declarative syntax around 2000. There are regular updates to the build system, including an active maintainer.

In summary, you have no idea what you're talking about.