There was a lot of interesting discussion on the previous post [0], but one thing I didn't see was much discussion about this bit:
> The DRM (graphics) subsystem has been an early adopter of the Rust language. It was still perhaps surprising, though, when Airlie (the DRM maintainer) said that the subsystem is only "about a year away" from disallowing new drivers written in C and requiring the use of Rust.
I was a bit surprised when I first read this. Is this meant to be read in a way that is more just a description of the state of Rust bindings (e.g., the DRM subsystem is about a year away from being able to require the use of Rust, but isn't actually planning on doing so), or it is describing actual plans (e.g., the DRM subsystem is about a year away from actually requiring the use of Rust)? I was originally more inclined to go for the former interpretation, but this other bit:
> With regard to adding core-kernel dependencies on Rust code, Airlie said that it shouldn't happen for another year or two.
Makes me think that perhaps the devs are actually considering the latter. Is anyone more in-the-know able to comment on this?
yourdetect•2h ago
> To me the more salient questions are how long before (a) we get Rust in a core subsystem (thus making Rust truly _required_ instead of "optional unless you have hardware foo"), and (b) requiring Rust for _all_ new code.
Previously, the position was that C developers would not be forced to learn Rust.
And a few days ago a security vulnerability was found in the Rust Linux kernel code.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46309536
AlotOfReading•1h ago
rtpg•1h ago
was it a security vulnerability? I'm pretty sure it was "just" a crash. Though maybe someone smarter than me could have turned that into something more.
I have no dog in this race, I really like the idea of Rust drivers but can very much understand retiscience at getting Rust to be handling more core parts of the kernel, just because Rust's value seems to pay off way more in higher level code where you have these invariants to maintain across large code paths (meanwhile writing a bunch of doubly-linked lists in unsafe Rust seems a bit like busy work, modulo the niceties Rust itself can give you)
taneliv•2m ago
It's a race condition resulting in memory corruption.[1][2] That corruption is shown to result in a crash. I don't think the implication is that it can result only in crashes, but this is not mentioned in the CVE.
Whether it is a vulnerability that an attacker can crash a system depends on your security model, I guess. In general it is not expected to happen and it stops other software from running, and can be controlled by entities or software who should not have that level of control, so it's considered a vulnerability.
[1] https://www.cve.org/CVERecord/?id=CVE-2025-68260 [2] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-cve-announce/2025121614-CVE-20...