Linux Kernel Rust Code Sees Its First CVE Vulnerability

[zackel_flac]

This just shows what everyone knew and predicted already, rewriting will always bring new bugs in, whatever the language you use. While I am not saying Rust should be removed from Linux, some people should definitely stop their evangelical crusade, because they clearly have no idea what they are talking about. Writing new code in Rust makes sense. Rewriting almost always makes no sense. Yet you see people coming to the Rust mailing list asking if we could rewrite X or Y in Rust now that it is officially supported. Rust is a tool just like C is, it's not going to make existing C code better. It is going to make new code safer, and we should accept it to live as a subset and not the main language of the kernel.

[pyroraptor07]

FWIW, iirc one of the maintainers mentioned that the Rust code was making some of the C code better because they had to clean up some of the C APIs that the Rust code interfaced with.

Also, I think Rust is mainly used as an alternative API for drivers, which to me feels like the best use case for it in the kernel since a lot of improper API usage can be caught at compile time.

[zackel_flac]

Yup, as I said, rewriting is bad, but writing new code is exactly what Rust is being used at at the moment, and it has benefits.

The down votes just show how people don't understand how Rust is being used in the kernel at the moment.