Existing maintainers and abstractions

Posted Sep 4, 2024 17:03 UTC (Wed) by corbet (editor, #1)
In reply to: Thoughts and clarifications by asahilina
Parent article: Whither the Apple AGX graphics driver?

I'll not challenge your comments on the DRM scheduler; you know that code, I do not. But one thing you said here struck me:

Honestly, I think giving existing kernel maintainers veto/ack power over Rust abstractions was a mistake

My feeling is that any alternative would have been far worse — it would be a quick path to the "second-class citizen" status that nobody wants for the Rust code. Maintainers who have had a bunch of Rust code pushed into their subsystem against their will are not going to go out of their way to avoid breaking it — some of them, anyway.

This is why I am saying that we need to find a better way to align everybody's goals.

The maintainer summit is less than two weeks away, and Rust should be well represented there. I hope that people will show up having thought about how we can improve this relationship.