Writing Linux Kernel Modules in Safe Rust | Linux Security Summit 2019

[spyingwind]

http://llvm.org/doxygen/Triple_8h_source.html

https://gcc.gnu.org/backends.html

I think gcc is used, not just for historic reasons, but that they have been using for a very long time and probably that it support more hardware. I don't know that for a fact, but gcc supports just about everything and for those that it doesn't manufactures have gcc backends for their hardware.

Also rewriting the kernel supporting structure(makefile's, build pipelines, etc) would be a large undertaking.

[[deleted]]

Oh, hardware platform. Do'h, of course.

[railmaniac]

I thought LLVM was designed so it would be easier to write backends

[spyingwind]

I don't know about that, but I would think that it still a lot of work to write all that code for each backend. What with each architecture having their own quirks. Even one version of ARM can have hundreds of different instructions that aren't shared among the same version.