Fabio Manganiello on Nostr: Wow. Everyone was waiting for Linus to take a stance on this topic. He did, and it ...
Wow. Everyone was waiting for Linus to take a stance on this topic.
He did, and it seems that we’re one step closer to the kernel being forked.
What disappoints me of Linus’ answer is that, again, he stresses that it’s important to keep the discussion technical, but then he’s the first to steer away from the actual content of this patch and go on to express his opinions.
The community of Linux kernel maintainers is indeed turning into a hostile mob of boomers, and I’m not sure if it’ll still be around as it is once most of them retire (which may be just a few years away).
They want to keep working only with a language that is slowly fading away and struggles to find new developers (and I say it as someone who has spent most of his career writing code in C and is still slowly learning Rust). They want to keep working only with grep and sed, and expect everybody who works on the project not to change their 30-year-old habits (which confirms that they haven’t built software in corporate environments for a very long time). They want to keep the discussions only on their mailing list and even oppose bringing them to social media.
The irony is that this patch would simply allow Rust code to access the direct memory access API, so drivers written in Rust have the same memory privileges as the remaining C code.
It’s not about rewriting critical portions of the kernel in Rust or whatever. The new Rust code would keep living under its own source subtree, like it’s been done so far, and it just needs to be able to access the same API as the C code.
So refusing this patch (and other related patches that have been ignored for months, and after an inquiry on the state the developers only get a “if you ask again then you’ll be ignored even more”) is a political stance, regardless of what Linus wants us to believe.
It’s the stance of a project ruled by an arrogant dictator for life and a bunch of aging boomers who feel that their experience in maintaining this particular project makes them entitled to treat everyone else like shit and oppose any form of change.
https://lkml.org/lkml/2025/2/6/1292
He did, and it seems that we’re one step closer to the kernel being forked.
What disappoints me of Linus’ answer is that, again, he stresses that it’s important to keep the discussion technical, but then he’s the first to steer away from the actual content of this patch and go on to express his opinions.
The community of Linux kernel maintainers is indeed turning into a hostile mob of boomers, and I’m not sure if it’ll still be around as it is once most of them retire (which may be just a few years away).
They want to keep working only with a language that is slowly fading away and struggles to find new developers (and I say it as someone who has spent most of his career writing code in C and is still slowly learning Rust). They want to keep working only with grep and sed, and expect everybody who works on the project not to change their 30-year-old habits (which confirms that they haven’t built software in corporate environments for a very long time). They want to keep the discussions only on their mailing list and even oppose bringing them to social media.
The irony is that this patch would simply allow Rust code to access the direct memory access API, so drivers written in Rust have the same memory privileges as the remaining C code.
It’s not about rewriting critical portions of the kernel in Rust or whatever. The new Rust code would keep living under its own source subtree, like it’s been done so far, and it just needs to be able to access the same API as the C code.
So refusing this patch (and other related patches that have been ignored for months, and after an inquiry on the state the developers only get a “if you ask again then you’ll be ignored even more”) is a political stance, regardless of what Linus wants us to believe.
It’s the stance of a project ruled by an arrogant dictator for life and a bunch of aging boomers who feel that their experience in maintaining this particular project makes them entitled to treat everyone else like shit and oppose any form of change.
https://lkml.org/lkml/2025/2/6/1292