Behold, a Linux maintainer openly admitting to attempting to sabotage the entire Rust for Linux project:
https://lwn.net/ml/all/[email protected]/
The good news is this doesn’t affect drm/asahi, our GPU driver. The bad news is it does affect all the other drivers we’re (re)writing in Rust, two so far with a third one coming.
Another choice quote, calling R4L “cancer”: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/[email protected]/
Personally, I would consider this grounds for removal of Christoph from the Linux project on Code of Conduct violation grounds, but sadly I doubt much will happen other than draining a lot of people’s energy and will to continue the project until Linus says “fuck you” or something.
As for how to move forward, if I were one of the Rust maintainers, I would just merge the patch (which does not touch code formally maintained by the dissenter). Either Linus takes the pull, and whatever Christoph says is irrelevant, or he doesn’t, and R4L dies. Everything else is a waste of everyone’s time and energy.
Edit: Sent in my 2 cents: https://lore.kernel.org/rust-for-linux/[email protected]/T/#m1944b6d485070970e359bbc7baa71b04c86a30af
Honestly both takes a bad. On the one hand you should be open to new idea but on the other it is wise to stick with old and tested.
Rust is still a lot newer and less well tested. It isn’t going to replace C any time soon but it is cool that we have some Rust code in the kernel.
You mean old and known to cause endless security vulnerabilities.
I’m very skeptical of sticking to “old and tested” without reasoning.
If you’re talking about the implementation, if they’re making changes it’s no longer “well tested”. If it’s undocumented, it’s not approachable. If you’re talking about toolchain, if the old is unapproachable because of inherent toolchain barriers, and custom toolchain dialects, I think it’s good to question.
There may also be something to say about them struggling to get new contributors and maintainers (from what I heard/read).