A motivated group of Rust developers could build a production ready mostly Linux-compatible kernel from scratch within 5 years without doing any politics on LKML
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@Sobex can we just collectively agree to shut the fuck up about drivers? Linux didn't have a competitive set of drivers for a long time, either, and here we are. I am really not prepared to revisit the bloody driver question
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Drew DeVaultreplied to Drew DeVault last edited by [email protected]
I'd like everyone to shut the hell up about driver compatibility. Seriously. It was an incredibly fucking annoying argument when Linux didn't have a competitive driver suite, too, and somehow we still managed to get to the point where Linux does have great driver support.
Fuck's sake. You write the drivers you need and then use the hardware that's supported, and if you want to support new hardware you write new drivers, you do not need to implement every driver overnight.
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@drewdevault Please for the love of all that's holy, AGPL it though
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Drew DeVaultreplied to Duncan Bayne last edited by [email protected]
@duncan_bayne no, GPL is the right choice. GPL 3 probably, but tbh I get Linus's preference for GPL 2.
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๐ง Jonathan Treffler ๐บ๐ฆ๐ต๐ธreplied to Drew DeVault last edited by
But it's not just hardware drivers.
Plenty of important stuff needs not just a working re-implementation of the linux-userspace ABI, but the linux kernel internal ABI too.
A kernel, where Linux userspace programs run, but I can't compile ZFS into as a kernel module is useless to me on most of my servers โ๏ธ
Somebody implementing AMD GPU drivers ? Hard but possible.
(1/2)
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Drew DeVaultreplied to ๐ง Jonathan Treffler ๐บ๐ฆ๐ต๐ธ last edited by
@JonathanTreffler one important thing to note is that this work is highly parallelizeable; a small group of contributors could champion e.g. io_uring compatibility and start making big wins very fast
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๐ง Jonathan Treffler ๐บ๐ฆ๐ต๐ธreplied to ๐ง Jonathan Treffler ๐บ๐ฆ๐ต๐ธ last edited by
Somebody re-implementing ZFS in Rust, which works with existing filesystems and can be read from regular ZFS afterwards ?
All the power to the person that tries to create that, but I am not holding my breath for that to every succeed.The compatibility breaking alternative would be to create a new filesystem with ZFS like capabilities and reliability (!!!) and I just don't see that ever happening.
(2/2)
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Drew DeVaultreplied to ๐ง Jonathan Treffler ๐บ๐ฆ๐ต๐ธ last edited by
@JonathanTreffler sure, but there are tons of use-cases which don't call for ZFS. Something like ext4 would cover a ton of use-cases and be achievable much more quickly. And with a solid footing it's a great place to start experimenting with more complex or novel filesystems.
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@martijnbraam @drewdevault Even if 10x or 100x, really irrelevant. The reason to use Rust is memory safety at runtime, not compilation time
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@raulinbonn @martijnbraam compile time does matter actually
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:PUA: Shlee fucked around andreplied to Drew DeVault last edited by
@drewdevault You absolutely love to see it.
Rustux is the real tux.
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@drewdevault especially for something niche starting with basic platform drivers, nvme (or alternative like ahci), and basic framebuffer (uefi based?) support, should be plenty for a lot of interesting projects, and provided it is architectured correctly a pretty good base for further expansion
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@deetwenty exactly. 100%
If you get a decent filesystem and a few network drivers (even virtio) and good POSIX support you're in the datacenter too
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@drewdevault if you're only targeting hardware commonly exposed in virtual machines, perhaps. But the real world usage needs real drivers for real hardware and they will be chasing this for years and years
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@feld not really. I re-iterate my request for everyone to shut up about drivers already
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Luca Barbatoreplied to Victoria๐ฟ๐๐ณ last edited by
@tragicomedy @martijnbraam @drewdevault
Which small program are we talking about?
I found plenty of projects being quicker to build (and rebuild) in rust compared to equivalents.
But the mileage obviously does vary a lot
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Victoria๐ฟ๐๐ณreplied to Luca Barbato last edited by
@lu_zero @martijnbraam @drewdevault "like yazi"
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Luca Barbatoreplied to Victoria๐ฟ๐๐ณ last edited by
@tragicomedy @martijnbraam @drewdevault
I looked at the current yazi main branch.
27288 loc in 463 files isn't exactly small.
Yet it builds here in 2 minutes:
Finished `release` profile [optimized] target(s) in 2m 13s
Most of it spent on link time at the very end.
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@lu_zero @tragicomedy @martijnbraam on what hardware?
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Victoria๐ฟ๐๐ณreplied to Luca Barbato last edited by
@lu_zero @martijnbraam @drewdevault 2 minutes? Do you have supercomputer?