Hellwig is the maintainer of the DMA subsystem. Hellwig previously blocked rust bindings for DMA code, which in part resulted in Hector Martin from stepping down as a kernel maintainer and eventually Asahi Linux as a whole.
Hellwig is the maintainer of the DMA subsystem. Hellwig previously blocked rust bindings for DMA code, which in part resulted in Hector Martin from stepping down as a kernel maintainer and eventually Asahi Linux as a whole.
Last time around Asahi Lina (major contributor to the Apple Silicon GPU driver) made a very nice writeup on mastodon about her attempts to mainline her work.
Part of the problem was that the C interface was straight-up broken; not only were a bunch of lifetimes undocumented, but freeing the kernel objects properly was impossible, but GCC doesn’t care and neither did anyone because GPU drivers are expected to just… never exit (IIRC). So she refactored it to be saner.
Anyway apparently it was rejected for much the same reasons, aka Rust bashing thinly disguised as concerns over maintainability.
Technically the R4L project did have an impact. But what’s the worst case? Spending some time on improving the C interface for an edge case? The ignominy! NAK.
To be clear I fully support Rust in Linux. I just think it’s going to rapidly be impractical to work on Linux without learning Rust.
The solution isn’t to pretend that isn’t the case; it’s to learn Rust!