Comment by harshreality | Hacker News Reader

Comment by harshreality | Hacker News Reader

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Kernel maintainers aren't doing anything to R4L folks except where their activities intersect with the upstream linux kernel. Your analogy isn't right.

R4L folks thought that preliminary R4L infrastructure being accepted upstream meant that all the changes they needed in the future would be accepted easily as well, and now that there are concerns from subsystem maintainers, a few R4L folks are playing the dramatic victim card.

From what I understand, market pressures are causing R4L folks to panic. If they can't get more R4L stuff upstream, people can't ship Rust drivers, and R4L development falls apart.

That's not kernel maintainers' problem, though. They have a job to do to, and it has nothing to do with Rust kernel drivers except as far as they're persuaded Rust drivers help the linux community overall and will be maintainable without unacceptably disrupting their tool-assisted workflows. Several of them have concluded, so far, that R4L PRs will unacceptably disrupt existing workflows.

That's where R4L has failed. They've failed to persuade subsystem maintainers that some added headaches/retooling/efficiency-loss is worth it to enable Rust drivers. Which drivers, and who wants to use them? Perhaps the potential downstream users of those drivers can talk with kernel devs, persuade them it's really valuable, and figure out a plan?

> a few R4L folks are playing the dramatic victim card.

Not just 'a few R4L folks', these are basically the spearhead of the effort. And it hasn't been a single occurrence, we now have seen two of those Rust developers resign from the effort out of pure frustration from the entrenched, heels-in-the-sand attitude from kernel maintainers.

The same thing has happened in the past. I will point to TuxOnIce, which got stonewalled by a stubborn maintainer. It would have moved most suspend and hibernation code to userspace, where it would have been easier to maintain and iterate. Or right now we have two divergent RAM compression paths (Zram and Zswap). There are patches for Zram to use the unified Zpool API, but the Zram maintainer refuses to integrate these for absolutely no solid technical reason.

It seems that the R4L peoples are fine with doing any effort required, as long as they know it is not in vain. So far, comments akin to "language barriers in the kernel are a cancer" and "I will do everything to prevent/sabotage this" do not exactly build trust in that regard.

As an aside, would it really be so horrible for kernel maintainers to learn (some) Rust? This is not a dire ask for someone in the software world, your job will often ask this of you. And I can't imagine the maintainers haven't ever dabbled in other languages and/or aren't capable enough to learn a second language.

I understand the fear that saying "ok, we can do more languages than one" opens up the door to a third and fourth language down the road, but that seems unlikely. There's a reason Rust has passed Linus' sniff test where no other language has so far.

> Which drivers, and who wants to use them?

Short term it seems mostly GPU drivers.

Long, looong term (multiple decades?) the plan is probably to rewrite more important parts of the kernel, to significantly increase memory safety.

> language barriers in the kernel are a cancer

Well they are. Second class citizens like this just cause problems.

> As an aside, would it really be so horrible for kernel maintainers to learn (some) Rust?

Are the Rust folks planning to pay the existing kernel developers for spending that time? Because otherwise it should be up to those existing maintainers to decide and not something anyone else gets to demand.

Overall this just sounds like people crying that their hostile takeover of an existing project is being met with resistance.

> > a few R4L folks are playing the dramatic victim card.

> Not just 'a few R4L folks', these are basically the spearhead of the effort.

A "spearhead" is by definition a few people.

> As an aside, would it really be so horrible for kernel maintainers to learn (some) Rust?

If they want to contribute to the Linux kernel, would it really be so horrible for these Rust programmers to learn the language the kernel is written in?

> There's a reason Rust has passed Linus' sniff test where no other language has so far.

Doesn't seem it has, really.

> the plan is probably to rewrite more important parts of the kernel

So just fork it and rewrite it all in Rust.

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