If Rust is going to happen, then it’ll happen.
How can it happen if individual maintainers say they’ll do everything in their power to keep Rust out of the kernel? There’s fundamentally no way forward. The R4L devs already gave every commitment they could, but some maintainers fundamentally don’t want it.
And before anyone brings it up: no, the maintainers weren’t asked to touch Rust code or not break Rust code or anything else.
Fact is Rust isn’t ready for every part of the kernel. C/Rust interop is still a growing pain for Linux and troubleshooting issues at the boundary require a developer to be good at both. It’s an uphill battle, and instead of inciting flame wars they could have fostered cooperation around the parts of the kernel that were more prepared. While their work is appreciated and they are incredibly talented, the reality is that social pressures are going to dictate development. At the end of the day software is used by people. Their expectations are not law, but they do need addressed to preserve public opinion.
Again: what cooperation is possible when the maintainer says “I’ll do everything in my power to keep Rust out of the kernel”? When they NACK a patch outside of their Subsystem?
Can a maintainer really NACK any patch they dislike? I mean I get that Hellwig said he won’t merge it. Fine. What if for example Kroah-Hartman says “whatever, I like it” and merges it nonetheless in his tree?
I doubt Greg is pulling in Rust until it has been through the mainline. That said, Linus can merge anything he wants.
It was an example. I don’t have a fucking clue how all the maintainers are named.
The main question was: why can a maintainer NACK something not in their responsibility? Isn’t it simply necessary to find one maintainer who is fine with it and pulls it in?
Or even asked differently: shouldn’t you need to find someone who ACKs it rather than caring about who NACKs it?
Let me just say that hierarchies are for breaking ties.
The normal process is that Linus prefers we all work through maintainers to cut down on the noise that comes to him. In this case, the maintainer is the reason the noise is coming to Linus. So, it will be up to him to settle it.
Yes, but asking him in this case was basically a courtesy, the code isn’t going into anything he manages. He can reject it, but that’s an opinion, not a decision. It can still be merged if the regular maintainer (or someone senior like Linus himself) approves.
Can you quote where that was said?
I’ve been following this debate for a bit and as far as I can tell it’s not so much that they’ll do what they can to keep rust out but more to make sure that the people who want to develop in rust are the ones who end up maintaining that part of the code and not the current maintainers.
Sure: https://lore.kernel.org/rust-for-linux/20250131075751.GA16720@lst.de/
I accept that you don’t want to be involved with Rust in the kernel, which is why we offered to maintain the Rust abstraction layer for the DMA coherent allocator as a separate component (which it would be anyways) ourselves.
Which doesn’t help me a bit. Every additional bit that the another language creeps in drastically reduces the maintainability of the kernel as an integrated project. The only reason Linux managed to survive so long is by not having internal boundaries, and adding another language complely breaks this. You might not like my answer, but I will do everything I can do to stop this.
Can’t get more explicit than this.
