Linux-for-Rust or Rust-for-Linux [LWN.net]

Linux-for-Rust or Rust-for-Linux

Posted Aug 30, 2024 23:05 UTC (Fri) by roc (subscriber, #30627)
In reply to: Linux-for-Rust or Rust-for-Linux by willy
Parent article: Rust-for-Linux developer Wedson Almeida Filho drops out

> I don't think, for example, that you can compile Rust for m68k or alpha at this point.

Museum architectures should use museum kernels. It would be madness to let a few hobbyists veto kernel improvements that would benefit all other users.

But also, Rust does support m68k: https://doc.rust-lang.org/rustc/platform-support/m68k-unk...
And hopefully gccrs will make these complaints go away for good.

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Linux-for-Rust or Rust-for-Linux

Posted Aug 31, 2024 12:01 UTC (Sat) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (5 responses)

> Museum architectures should use museum kernels. It would be madness to let a few hobbyists veto kernel improvements that would benefit all other users.

Except for the little detail that "museum architectures" (and the long tail of old drivers/filesystems/etc) are part of the mainline kernel.

Where do you draw the popularity line? Currently it's at "someone is actively maintaining it."

Linux-for-Rust or Rust-for-Linux

Posted Aug 31, 2024 21:25 UTC (Sat) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link] (4 responses)

I'm actually paraphrasing Linus: https://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/2210.2/08845.html
> At some point, people have them as museum pieces. They might as well run museum kernels.

If new hardware hasn't been sold for 20 years then I think that's probably a good enough line.

Linux-for-Rust or Rust-for-Linux

Posted Sep 1, 2024 18:01 UTC (Sun) by willy (subscriber, #9762) [Link] (3 responses)

The problem is that you can still @#$&%^= buy them!

https://www.nxp.com/products/processors-and-microcontroll...

I'm disappointed, mostly because I worked on a PowerQUICC board back in 2000 and the fact that they are still selling the 68360 24 years later makes me very sad.

Linux-for-Rust or Rust-for-Linux

Posted Sep 2, 2024 7:25 UTC (Mon) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link] (2 responses)

Rust actually supports M68K so the real problem is if you could buy new Alpha chips. I don't think you've been able to do that for a long time.

Linux-for-Rust or Rust-for-Linux

Posted Sep 2, 2024 16:03 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

As I understood it (I never used them) the M68K chips had a sane design, unlike the x86 ones. Maybe the reason you can still buy them is people value them for their simplicity and "easy to understand"ness - that can be worth a lot.

Cheers,
Wol

Linux-for-Rust or Rust-for-Linux

Posted Sep 2, 2024 19:12 UTC (Mon) by pbonzini (subscriber, #60935) [Link]

The current m68k chips (ColdFire) are a reduced and simplified version of the original instruction set. I doubt that a backwards compatible 680x0 with the addition of SIMD, 64-bit support, CFI, virtualization and whatnot (for example system-wide innovation such as multiprocessor and a fast superscalar microarchitecture) would be overall any more manageable than x86.

Linux-for-Rust or Rust-for-Linux

Posted Sep 1, 2024 11:40 UTC (Sun) by ralfj (subscriber, #172874) [Link]

> And hopefully gccrs will make these complaints go away for good.

Or, (in my view) more likely, rustc_codegen_gcc. :)