Rust for Linux

The best starting place is probably the web page of the project, rust-for-linux.com. This page is meant as a hub of links, documentations and resources to this topic. One source that does not seem to work well is the github Good first issues page, which currently is not up to date, and all good first issues are already done or in progress by somebody. On the other hand, the Rust-for-Linux github repo is still in use and commits are pushed to it on a regular basis.

The different branches of the project are explained here. The site on Contributions gives additional ideas how to advance the integration of Rust in the Linux Kernel.

The mainline kernel does not merge code unless there is a use case in-tree, and Rust is no exception there. Therefore, only things that are actually used can be upstreamed. When new Rust kernel modules arrive, the features that they depend on are also added. As an example, workqueues were merged because Rust Binder will need them eventually.

Mailing list

You can subscribe to the mailing list rust-for-linux@vger.kernel.org and receive all the discussions and patches related to Rust-for-Linux, and therefore stay up to date on everything that happens in this project. The development of Rust for Linux is happening on this mailinglist, and this is also where you would send your patches to.

Zulip

Zulip is a mix between a chat and a forum, where all kinds of questions about this project can be asked, and will be answered by other people in the project. The questions are sorted by topic (e.g. Networking, Library, Filesystems, Meetings, Modules, etc.). If you ask a question, you can be sure to have an answer the latest in a few days time.

Zulip is the place which is most active and a good starting point for beginners to get in contact and maybe find out what a good first project could be. Many people involved in writing abstractions/drivers are there, and may have some suggestions for new drivers in their area of expertise.

Rust reference drivers

Another good starting point is also having a look at Rust reference drivers, which are drivers that subsystem maintainers are allowed to introduce in their subsystem in order to provide example implementations of existing drivers, therefore in this way bootstrap abstractions. This “live documentation” is also used to prepare the subsystem for Rust over time, and to see for the maintainers whether the effort to advantage is worth it for their subsystem.

The first reference driver joining mainline is the one for the Asix PHYs.

If you have never seen a Linux Kernel driver written in Rust, look at this LWN article comparing a GPIO driver between the C and the Rust implementation. Also from personal experience, I can say that using Rust instead of C reduces the lines of code quite a bit.

Open meetings

If you want to get in touch, also feel free to join one of the Open Meetings.