karolherbst 🐧 🦀 (@[email protected])
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If a single percent of regular Linux users use either of those on a daily basis, I'll eat a bug. And desktop Linux isn't even a significant amount of Linux use in general. So why would the kernel developers give the slightest shit about either of them?
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Linus is definitely not American. That is no excuse he way he just ignored the dma maintainer's behavior and that is no excuse for why nobody in leadership did or said anything even after the connotation of the phrase was explained by another in the thread. The only thing that brought enough attention for any comment was marcan's responses, and Linus just basically came in and said to stop making noise.
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Nouveau is important because Nouveau is the default driver in Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE, Debian, and most other distros.
Linux distributions can't easily distribute the proprietary
nvidiadrivers or the slightly less proprietarynvidia-opendrivers do they depend on nouveau as the default nvidia driver. When you install a distro it usually has to use the nouveau drivers before downloading the proprietary blobs from Nvidia.Nouveau is the only reason anyone can use Linux on an Nvidia card long enough to install the other drivers.
It's also actively maintained, receiving updates that get upstreamed almost daily.
I'm not sure what about those things says "defunct".
And the rust developments in Asahi for the M1+ series of CPUs don't just benefit Mac but all the ARM CPUs as well.
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https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2024/03/nova-a-rust-based-linux-driver-for-nvidia-gpus-announced/
By one of the two remaining Nouveau maintainers.
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This new driver is also written in Rust, so nothing changes
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Man you better hope the kernel community gets its shit together then, cause Krummrich (the primary developer for nova and getting those changes upstreamed) is one of guys that got told their project was cancer by the "thin blue line" maintainer from the article.
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If a single percent of regular Linux users use either of those on a daily basis, I’ll eat a bug.
Found one right here
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Would also be interesting to see a Rust version of Genode
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The words may be american but the mindset is the same for cops around the globe.
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The leadership response to this and the subsequent backlash is starting to remind me of the NixOS debacle from about a year ago.
That resulted in the project being split and like 30% of the community moving off and creating Lix.
I would be disappointed, but not surprised, if we see something similar in the Kernel sometime in the next year or two...
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Is there any write-up for the recent events around the kernel and Rust? Glancing over recent posts, it seems like new devs want to push Rust, but older maintainers don't want to deal with it.
Why do people love Rust so much? Is it just a loud minority or does it in fact offer substancial gains and safety over existing C code?
Lqstly, can they simply fork the kernel and try their own thing? E.g. do a branch as a proof of concept and therefore convince them to migrate? -
can they simply fork?
Forking the Linux kernel will effectively guarantee that no one will run their software. None, but the most niche distros would ship it. If the Rust people are forced to fork, their time may be better spent contributing to Redox.
Why do people love Rust so much?
Rust makes it very difficult (but not impossible) to write dangerous code, whereas C pretty much guarantees you'll write something dangerous (and therefore insecure or buggy) at some point, especially in larger codebases, like the Linux kernel. Arrogant devs will defend C by saying things like "write better code", but if the people writing kernel code for 20 years are still writing dangerously flawed code, it's safe to say that at a certain point, we need a better tool. That tool is Rust.
Rust also has very high-quality libraries that produce nicer finished products. I learned Rust because of
clapandratatui, which make superior CLIs and TUIs to anything else. Seriously, go use a CLI or TUI that was made in Rust. Trybat, acatclone. You'll get easy, great command-line completions, easy-to-read help output, optional, beautiful syntax-highlighting, theming, etc.And I say all of that as someone that likes C. C is really fun, and it's a very powerful language, but it was not designed to be memory-safe. If it was, the people complaining about Rust would just complain about C too.
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I think a sort of Linux compatibility layer could go a long way toward making Redox more viable. It may already have one, but that seems like a good place for an ex-Linux kernel dev to work.
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From what I remember, it's much more difficult to accidentally leak memory in Rust. Combined with the drop-in compatibility with C and the somewhat more intuitive (imo) syntax, I can see its popularity as unsurprising.
I think the biggest thing is that there aren't really that many reasons not to use Rust.
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ratatuiThat's a simply amazing pun for a library name. I really enjoy the history of kind of silly naming within linux and programming generally.
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Sorry to say it (and as much as i like C) but C is already on the path to inevitable obsolescence. Everyone is learning Rust now and fewer people are learning C. Maybe not soon, but definitely eventually. Linux can join C on thus path to obsolescence or it can pivot to a language that still has a clear future.
Rust will go obsolete a some point too when the next next generation of languages come out. And software projects using Rust will have to switch languages again so stay relevant.
That's just the computer circle of life.
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Rust is already in the kernel and Torvalds wants more, faster. He's being obstructed by C purists, who at this point are the people who should fork the kernel if they see anything but C as heresy.
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Leaking isn't really the issue, though I suppose Rust helps with that as well. Its memory sales pitch is more about memory safety, which is not reading or writing the wrong parts of memory. Doing that can have all sorts of effects, where the best you can hope for is a crash, but it often results in arbitrary execution vulnerabilities. Memory _un_safety is pretty rare and most prominent in languages like C, C++ and Zig.
Rust also has more information contained in it, which means resulting programs can actually be faster than C, as the optimizer in the compiler is better informed.
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I think it's a big flaw of the mailing list system of the kernel development. Marcan's reaction led to everyone trying to "protect the thread" from being "derailed" and ignore the actual comments that in themselves should've been discussed properly.
Even leads to people here saying Marcan overreacted when I think on other social media platforms this would've been its own conversation separate to the conduct of other users.
I say this purely speculatively since I havent ever held a longrunning group convo in a mailing list intentionally.
