Empirical Study of Rust-for-Linux: Success, Dissatisfaction, and Compromise

Explore an empirical study on the Rust-for-Linux (RFL) project in this 20-minute conference talk from USENIX ATC '24. Delve into the potential of RFL to address Linux's long-standing memory and concurrency bugs by incorporating Rust's static ownership and type checkers into the kernel code. Examine the researchers' analysis of 6 key RFL drivers, including hundreds of issues, pull requests, thousands of GitHub commits, and mail exchanges from the Linux mailing list. Discover the study's findings on how Rust integrates with Linux, its effectiveness in ensuring driver safety without performance overhead, and the challenges faced by developers. Learn about the limitations of Rust in fully eliminating kernel vulnerabilities and the potential costs in runtime overhead and development efforts. Gain insights into the current state of RFL and its implications for the future of Linux kernel development.