Rust For Linux Kernel Patches Revised With Upgraded Rust Toolchain, Build Improvements

Miguel Ojeda has published his third iteration of the patches implementing the basic infrastructure for supporting the Rust programming language within the Linux kernel.

Back in December were the v2 patches and now just over one month later the version 3 patches are ready for testing.

The updated Rust for Linux kernel code now moves to Rust 1.58 as the compiler version targeted, automatic detection whether a suitable Rust toolchain is available, other build system improvements, and improved documentation as well as other general code clean-ups and improvements.

Miguel noted on the Rust side there are some improvements on the horizon too, "One of the unstable features we need, `-Zsymbol-mangling-version=v0`, is getting stabilized in 1.59.0. Another one, `maybe_uninit_extra`, will be in 1.60.0."

The Rust infrastructure for the Linux kernel along with some basic sample code currently puts this v3 patch series at 33.5k lines of new code. See the v3 patches out for review on the kernel mailing list.

Hopefully this year Rust will make it into the mainline Linux kernel.