Hello everyone and welcome to ZDTech, ZDNet’s daily editorial podcast. My name is Guillaume Serries, and today I am explaining to you why the Rust programming language could quickly integrate the kernel of the Linux operating system.
Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, would like to see the Rust programming language integrated into the core of the operating system in the next major release. But it’s not entirely won.
Because this landing of the Rust programming language on Linux would be simply revolutionary. For more than three decades, Linux has been written using the C programming language. Linux is certainly the most remarkable software achievement written in the C language.
It must be said that the schedule is tight
But in recent years, more and more developers are using the Rust development language to scale Linux. To the point that Rust is now the second language of Linux. “I would like the merger with Rust to be launched in the next version, but we will see” confided to ZDNet the father of Linux at the very recent Open Source Summit which has just been held in Austin, Texas.
Needless to say, the schedule is tight. Linus Torvalds and the other Linux kernel maintainers are currently working on Linux version 5.19, which should be available to users in early August. And the average time between new mainline kernel releases is 9-10 weeks. So Rust could be integrated into the kernel in its 5.20 version, which should arrive at the end of October or the beginning of November 2022.
So at this point in the podcast you’re thinking, “ok, but why is it so important to switch from C to Rust?” Well, the Rust programming language, offered by Mozilla since 2010, lends itself more easily to writing secure software.
And besides, its performance is comparable to that of C as far as execution speed is concerned.
For Samartha Chandrashekar, AWS Product Manager, Rust “helps ensure thread safety and avoid memory-related errors, such as buffer overflows that can lead to security vulnerabilities.” And this opinion seems to be shared by a large number of developers, including Linus Torvalds.
But what is already clear is that no one is going to rewrite all of the 30 million or so lines of the Linux kernel in Rust.
Only kernel upgrades are affected by this programming language upgrade. And those evolutions are the use of existing APIs in the kernel, architecture support, and application binary interface compatibility between Rust and C.
So, if all goes well, you can expect to see Rust in the Linux kernel before the end of the year. Then it will start appearing in major Linux distributions such as Debian, Ubuntu, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, by 2023.