Following arguments on the Linux kernel mailing list the past few days over some Linux kernel maintainers being against the notion of Rust code in the mainline Linux kernel and trying to avoid it and very passionate views over the Linux kernel development process, Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin has removed himself from being an upstream maintainer of the ARM Apple code.
It’s really a bummer seeing how much childish drama is in the Linux dev community.
I am not nearly a good enough dev to contribute to the Linux kernel, but I am working my way towards that point currently at night after my kids are in bed. Be the change and what not.
This news along with the news of WiFi driver maintainer stepping down, feels like there won’t be any new blood in Linux kernel development except for corporate funded developers.
Unsurprising. You don’t have to follow Hector Martin on social media for very long to learn that he’s a petulant, indignant, self-righteous drama queen.
I’m not going to deny that he can act aggressively, but his point is still valid. The anti-Rust sentiments of some maintainers has slowed down the upstreaming of Rust into the kernel. It doesn’t make sense to waste people’s time by letting R4L limp along in its current state.
R4L either needs to be given the go-ahead to get things upstreamed, to the dismay of some Linux maintainers who don’t like Rust, or R4L should be killed and removed from the kernel so we can stop wasting people’s time.
Personally, I think killing R4L would be a major mistake. Android’s Linux fork with Rust support has been a major success for Google and significantly cut down on vulnerabilities. And the drivers for Apple’s M chips has been surprisingly robust given how new they are and for being reverse engineered.
Sounds a lot like Linus Torvalds back in the day, just saying…
Some similarities but the main difference in my eyes is that Linus doesn’t have a permanent victim complex.
It seems a lot of new developers want to do some things differently; old guard devs can either make some compromises, or accept that fewer new devs will want to be part of upstream.
Rust seems to be imperative for security. I hope people in the Linux kernel community put aside their differences and find common ground for the benefit of everyone.
From my perspective as an outsider, there is a lot of apparent hostility and seemingly bad faith engagements going on in this space. Hopefully the reasons are innocuous like them just not wanting to learn a new language, to avoid increasing their workload, or to simply avoid working with the Rust team for whatever reasons they might have.
I would argue that anybody standing in the way of progress and increased security should be moved out of the way. No need for shaming or deep dives, just move the ship forward.
Hector posting it to social media, and by his own admission, to shame the C devs, is pretty hostile and bad faith too. Imo it’s the most overt occurrence of hostility here, but no one seems to mind? Are people just completely numb to social media hostilities or smth?
Social media is virtual town hall and a place for many to vent and deal with their emotions - not everybody is perfect and uses the internet the way you approve of. It’s truly no different in essence than the LKML or other public-facing communication platforms - it just has more voices and more free engagement. We can be big people who express ourselves any way we’d like as long as we respect others the way we’d like to be respected.
I don’t advocate for shaming because I wouldn’t want it done to me, but I don’t see Hector acting in bad faith, and their actions are questionably hostile because Hector clearly wavered in their approach. They are under a lot of stress and are obviously motivated by the feelings of the other R4L maintainers and their issues - Hector’s good faith and empathy is plain to see. They are very upset that others are being disrespected, that their work is being unnecessarily questioned, and that their efforts overall are likened to a “cancer” while people openly stand in their way.
Did Hector disrespect the maintainer in question? Did Hector call people to action in order to shame the maintainer in question? Their initial intention did matter, of course, and I was not able to read the drama in question on social media because it appears to be removed. Hector certainly wanted the maintainer removed, which I don’t personally agree is ideal or fair, but it’s not their decision and it’s not social media’s decision.
On the flip-side in this instance, I similarly see somebody who brings up valid issues with splitting the codebase accompanied by a lot of emotions spilling out (like seeing Rust as a cancer, and vowing to stop it from spreading in the codebase further), but I personally fail to see how that is their problem if the code isn’t going to involve them. It’s up to Linus and the larger LKML community to discuss the form in which Rust will take in the Linux kernel.
Clearly a discussion that could be had with Hector included, but there is a lot of hostility towards larger public focus coming from Linus, and he effectively shut the discussion down and accused Hector of being the problem. There certainly are problems all around, from my perspective, but all of that could’ve been resolved, and still can.
Does the kernel not need a lot of memory unsafe Rust code? There is a way to bypass the safety nets and I heard that for stuff like kernel development that is necessity.
Yes, from my understanding as an outsider and layman, of course. From my perspective, the observation and insights developed from the R4L project will make Linux much stronger project overall moving forwards.
Agreed, especially as the proprietary alternatives are starting to incorporate more and more Rust, even Windows is starting to rewrite their core libraries in Rust.
On top of security though, its going to be important for continuing to bring new maintainers onboard. Less and less people are learning C, especially to a level proficient enough to be a kernel maintainer. As Rust matures even more, C is effectively a legacy language at this point, a C++ won’t be too far behind either, and Linux is going to be hard pressed to find maintainers as the graybeards retire.
What is it that rust is less preferable to?
- Dumb culture wars around programming languages.
- It a lot different from C. In C, you have
Typeidentifier variable;, in Rust you havelet mut variable : Typeidentifier;, and it’s just the tip of the iceberg. - Some of its safety features (including RAII - a favorite feature of marcan) are both detrimental to the performance and hard or impossible to opt out from.
The kernel developers should Come up with a memory safe version of C for developing on the kernel. Kind of like how Git was created.
So… Rust?
They kind of already do. The C used by the kernel team isn’t the exact same as what everyone else uses. Mainly because of the tooling they’ve built around it. I can’t remember specifics, but the tooling in place really helps out in that department.
Also, “memory safe C” is already a proposal for the C lang project.
Linus needs to step back again. He’s a liability to the kernel’s long term sustainability.
I wish rust ppl would listen to the maintainers of the 30+ year old c project.
They have decades of experience maintaining and patching contributions made by people who are no longer active and the small request that those contributions be in the language of the project isn’t something to fight against.
It’s really a bummer when skilled developers fall back on stuff like “if shaming on social media doesn’t work, what am I supposed to do?”
Dunno man, when what the dev of 30+ years said was more or less “fuck off”, it seems that advice was in fact heeded
The system works
