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Mixing Rust and C in Linux likened to cancer by maintainer
(www.theregister.com)
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this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2025
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Hellwig has some excellent points and people are up in arms solely because he’s not giving the green light for the shiny new toy.
This is a perfectly valid approach, anyone claiming he’s resistant for no reason has never tried maintaining a multi language code base.
Again an entirely reasonable approach. There is precedence for this approach in the kernel/dma and I see no reason to change this now, unless a full kernel/dma rewrite to Rust were to occur.
What they are asking is not to change the c code to suit rust, but to leave the C code as is, and have a single Rust-written wrapper that links into the C DMA code so that other Rust drivers can link into the wrapper. Additionally, said wrapper is not to be maintained by Hellwig, but by the maintainers of the drivers that will use the wrapper, so without overhead for Hellwig.
He is not asking to not make his work harder, he's explicitly asking to make it harder to write rust drivers that use DMA.
So you think Hellwig doesn’t understand what is and isn’t intended to go into the kernel/dma that dma maintainers would then be responsible for?
You don’t seem to be familiar with either the full conversation the developers had (its all available) or you don’t understand how the Linux project is structured and maintained.
From the email chain:
On Thu, Jan 16, 2025 at 02:17:24PM +0100, Danilo Krummrich wrote:
Martin's already in the list of maintainers for another subsystem; this is a territorial play by Hellwig. Any kernel developer would recognize this; you don't seem especially familiar with kernel social dynamics either! Also please fix your formatting if you're going to copy-and-paste rather than linking.
Martin is not a maintainer of the Kernel/DMA which is why Hellwig clearly states he doesn’t want to add another maintainer when rejecting Martin’s offer to be a maintainer of this proposed code.
This is very clear if you read the email. If you don’t like the formatting go read the full email chain yourself, you will know where to find it if you’re so familiar with ‘kernel social dynamics’.