Wedson Almeida Filho is a Microsoft engineer who has been prolific in his contributions to the Rust for the Linux kernel code over the past several years. Wedson has worked on many Rust Linux kernel features and even did a experimental EXT2 file-system driver port to Rust. But he’s had enough and is now stepping away from the Rust for Linux efforts.
From Wedon’s post on the kernel mailing list:
I am retiring from the project. After almost 4 years, I find myself lacking the energy and enthusiasm I once had to respond to some of the nontechnical nonsense, so it’s best to leave it up to those who still have it in them.
…
I truly believe the future of kernels is with memory-safe languages. I am no visionary but if Linux doesn’t internalize this, I’m afraid some other kernel will do to it what it did to Unix.
Lastly, I’ll leave a small, 3min 30s, sample for context here: https://youtu.be/WiPp9YEBV0Q?t=1529 – and to reiterate, no one is trying force anyone else to learn Rust nor prevent refactorings of C code."
The comments from that article are some of the most vitriolic I’ve ever seen on a technical issue. Goes to prove the maintainer’s point though.
Some are good for a laugh though, like assertions that Rust in the kernel is a Microsoft sabotage op or LLVM is for grifters and thieves.
RUST ppl feel like ARCH ppl. yes it might be better than some other setup yadda yadda, but they are so enervating.i’d rather switch back to windows11 than read another post/blog on how som crustians replaced this or that c library. just shut up already.
The sad thing is, there are other languages better at replacing C/C++ due to closer resemblance, except they’re rarely used due to lack of trendy technology that is being hyped in Rust. D lost a lot of ground due to its maintainers didn’t make it an “immutable by default” language at the time when functional programming paradigm was the next big thing in programming (which D can still do, as long as you’re not too fussy about using
consteverywhere).It was never about replacing C with a new language for the sake of novelty, it was about solving the large majority of security vulnerabilities that are inherent in memory-unsafe languages.
If Rust were to implode tomorrow, some other memory-safe language would come along and become equally annoying to developers who think they’re the first and only person to suggest just checking the code really hard for memory issues before merge.
Ted Ts’o is a prick with a god complex. I understand his experience is hard to match, we all have something in our lives we’re that good at, but that does not need to lead to acting like a fucking religious fanatic.
I understand his experience is hard to match, we all have something in our lives we’re that good at
At some point, that mix of experience and ego becomes a significant liability. He’s directly hurting the adoption of Rust in the kernel, while the C code he’s responsible for is full of problems that would have been impossible if written in safe Rust.
CVE-2024-42304 — crash from undocumented function parameter invariants
CVE-2024-40955 — out of bounds read
CVE-2024-0775 — use-after-free
CVE-2023-2513 — use-after-free
CVE-2023-1252 — use-after-free
CVE-2022-1184 — use-after-free
CVE-2020-14314 — out of bounds read
CVE-2019-19447 — use-after-free
CVE-2018-10879 — use-after-free
CVE-2018-10878 — out of bounds write
CVE-2018-10881 — out of bounds read
CVE-2015-8324 — null pointer dereference
CVE-2014-8086 — race condition
CVE-2011-2493 — call function pointer in uninitialized struct
CVE-2009-0748 — null pointer dereferencecrash from undocumented function parameter invariants
My favourite, as that was the exact point the dev was making in his talk, that the stuff is badly documented and that the function signature would document it perfectly.
My favorite, as that is the exact point made by anti-rust people.
What kind of type signature would prove the first block of any directory in an ext4 filesystem image isn’t a hole?
The first directory block is a hole. But type == DIRENT, so no error is reported. After that, we get a directory block without ‘.’ and ‘…’ but with a valid dentry. This may cause some code that relies on dot or dotdot (such as make_indexed_dir()) to crash
The problem isn’t that the block is a hole. It’s that the downstream function expects the directory block to contain
.and.., and it gets given one without because of incorrect error handling.You can encode the invariant of “has dot and dot dot” using a refinement type and smart constructor. The refined type would be a directory block with a guarantee it meets that invariant, and an instance of it could only be created through a function that validates the invariant. If the invariant is met, you get the refined type. If it isn’t, you only get an error.
This doesn’t work in C, but in languages with stricter type systems, refinement types are a huge advantage.
Wouldn’t it still crash when the smart constructor was called?
If it were poorly designed and used exceptions, yes. The correct way to design smart constructors is to not actually use a constructor directly but instead use a static method that forces the caller to handle both cases (or explicitly ignore the failure case). The static method would have a return type that either indicates “success and here’s the refined type” or “error and this is why.”
In Rust terminology, that would be a
Result<T, Error>.For Go, it would be
(*RefinedType, error)(where dereferencing the first value without checking it would be at your own peril).C++ would look similar to Rust, but it doesn’t come as part of the standard library last I checked.
C doesn’t have the language-level features to be able to do this. You can’t make a refined type that’s accessible as a type while also making it impossible to construct arbitrarily.
No intention of validating that behavior, it’s uncalled for and childish, but I think there is another bit of “nontechnical nonsense” on the opposite side of this silly religious war: the RIIR crowd. Longstanding C projects (sometimes even projects written in dynamic languages…?) get people that know very little about the project, or at least have never contributed, asking for it to be rewritten or refactored in Rust, and that’s likely just as tiring as the defensive C people when you want to include Rust in the kernel.
People need to chill out on both sides of this weird religious war. A programming language is just a tool: its merits in a given situation should be discussed logically.
I imagine this mentality is frustrating because of how many times they have to explain that they weren’t forcing people to learn Rust and that the Rust bindings were second class citizens. They never said to rewrite the kernel in Rust.
That’s disengenuous though.
-
We’re not forcing you to learn rust. We’ll just place code in your security critical project in a language you don’t know.
-
Rust is a second class citizen, but we feel rust is the superior language and all code should eventually benefit from it’s memory safety.
-
We’re not suggesting that code needs to be rewritten in rust, but the Linux kernel development must internalise the need for memory safe languages.
No other language community does what the rust community does. Haskellers don’t go to the Emacs project and say “We’d like to write Emacs modules, but we think Haskell is a much nicer and safer functional language than Lisp, so how about we add the capability of using Haskell and Lisp?”. Pythonistas didn’t add Python support to Rails along side Ruby.
Rusties seem to want to convert everyone by Trojan horsing their way into communities. It’s extremely damaging, both to those communities and to rust itself.
-
The kernel is mostly written in C, by C developers… understandably they’re rather refactor C code to make it better instead of rewritting everything in the current fancy language that’ll save the world this time (especially considering proponents of said language always, at every chance they get, sell it as C is crap, this is better).
Linux is over 30yo and keeps getting better and more stable, that’s the power of open-source.
C is crap for anything where security matters. I’ll happily take that debate with anyone who thinks differently.
[This comment has been deleted by an automated system]
such a weird dichotomy in Windows – secure kernel space and privacy-nightmare user space … “we’re the only ones allowed to steal your data”
deleted by creator
This is a little off topic and admittedly an oversimplification, but people saying Rust’s memory safety isn’t a big deal remind me of people saying static typing isn’t a big deal.
Totally
Oof, that video… I don’t have enough patience to put up with that sort of thing either. I wonder how plausible a complete Rust fork of the kernel would be.
That person in the audience was really grinding my gears. Just let the folks you’re talking to answer you; no need to keep going on your diatribe when it’s based on a false assumption and waste the whole room’s time.
It’s always been this way. Except that it was kernel developers arguing with kernel developers over C code. Now it’s relative newcomers arguing with kernel developers over Rust code that the kernel devs don’t necessarily care about. Of course it’s going to be a mess.
A fork is of course possible, but operating systems are huge and very complex, you really don’t want to alienate these folks that have been doing exclusively this for 30 years. It would be hard to keep the OS commercially viable with a smaller group and having to do both the day to day maintenance, plus the rewrite. It’s already difficult as it is currently.
Rust will be a huge success in time, long after the current names have lost their impetus. This is not a “grind for 4 years and it’s done” project.
folks that have been doing this exclusively for 30 years
And yet the number of people I hear “just switch to Linux!” When the other person has been using Windows for 30 years blows my mind.
Inertia is a hell of a drug.
Who the fuck is this little shit? Can’t they even be a little considerate towards rust? Just because they have 15 years worth of inertia for C doesn’t mean they can close their eyes and say “nope, I’m not interested”. I do not see how the kernel can survive without making rust a first class citizen
It’s Ted Ts’o, the maintainer of the ext4 filesystem amongst other things.
little shit
Though you’re still accurate despite his seniority.
There’s really only one valid response to Ted Ts’o:
If you think you can do better with C, prove it.
CVE-2024-42304 — crash from undocumented function parameter invariants
CVE-2024-40955 — out of bounds read
CVE-2024-0775 — use-after-free
CVE-2023-2513 — use-after-free
CVE-2023-1252 — use-after-free
CVE-2022-1184 — use-after-free
CVE-2020-14314 — out of bounds read
CVE-2019-19447 — use-after-free
CVE-2018-10879 — use-after-free
CVE-2018-10878 — out of bounds write
CVE-2018-10881 — out of bounds read
CVE-2015-8324 — null pointer dereference
CVE-2014-8086 — race condition
CVE-2011-2493 — call function pointer in uninitialized struct
CVE-2009-0748 — null pointer dereferenceHow many vulnerabilities have the kernel Rust team introduced in the same time period on the same code?
Let me know when you find one?
Memory ownership isn’t the only source of vulnerabilities. It’s a big issue, sure, but don’t think rust code is invulnerable.
Of course. Rust isn’t immune to logic errors, off-by-one mistakes, and other such issues. Nor is it memory safe in
unsafeblocks.Just by virtue of how memory safety issues account for 50%+ of vulnerabilities, it’s worth genuinely considering as long as the bindings don’t cause maintainability issues.
At the cost of sounding naive and stupid, wouldn’t it be possible to improve compilers to not spew out unsafe executables? Maybe as a compile time option so people have time to correct the source.
the semantics of C make that virtually impossible. the compiler would have to make some semantics of the language invalid, invalidating patterns that are more than likely highly utilized in existing code, thus we have Rust, which built its semantics around those safety concepts from the beginning. there’s just no way for the compiler to know the lifetime of some variables without some semantic indication
At the cost of sounding naive and stupid
It may be a naive question, but it’s a very important naive question. Naive doesn’t mean bad.
The answer is that that is not possible, because the compiler is supposed to translate the very specific language of C into mostly very specific machine instructions. The programmers who wrote the code, did so because they usually expect a very specific behavior. So, that would be broken.
But also, the “unsafety” is in the behavior of the system and built into the language and the compiler.
It’s a bit of a flawed comparison, but you can’t build a house on a foundation of wooden poles, because of the advantages that wood offers, and then complain that they are flammable. You can build it in steel, but you have to replace all of the poles. Just the poles on the left side won’t do.
And you can’t automatically detect the unsafe parts and just patch those either. If we could, we could just fix them directly or we could automatically transpile them. Darpa is trying that at the moment.
What is so hard to understand, C Is a fucking security issues?
There’s always going to be pushback on new ideas. He’s basically asking people questions like “Hey how does your thing work? I want to write it in rust.” and gets the answer “I’m not going to learn rust.”.
I think rust is generally a good thing and with a good amount of tests to enforce behavior it’s possible to a functionally equivalent copy of the current code with no memory issues in future maintenance of it. Rewriting things in rust will also force people to clarify the behavior and all possible theoretical paths a software can take.
I’m not gonna lie though, if I would have worked on software for 20 years and people would introduce component that’s written in another language my first reaction would be “this feels like a bad idea and doesn’t seem necessary”.
I really hope that the kernel starts taking rust seriously, it’s a great tool and I think it’s way easier to write correct code in rust than C. C is simple but lacks the guardrails of modern languages which rust has.
The process of moving to rust is happening but it’s going to take a really long time. It’s a timescale current maintainers don’t really need to worry about since they’ll be retired anyway.
The video attached is a perfect example of the kind of “I’m not prepared to learn anything new so everyone else is wrong” attitude that is eating away at Linux like a cancer.
If memory safety isn’t adopted into the kernel, and C fanaticism discarded, Linux will face the same fate as the kernels it once replaced. Does the Linux foundation want to drag its heels and stuff millions into AI ventures whilst sysadmins quietly shift to new kernels that offer memory safety, or does it want to be part of that future?
If Linux gets rewritten in Rust it will be a new kernel, not Linux. You can make new kernels, even in Rust but they aren’t Linux. You can advertise them at Linux conferences but you can’t force every Linux dev to work on your new Rust kernel.
Is a single line of code in the kernel completely unchanged since its birth?
Isn’t Linux still Linux even though probably a lot of the original code is gone? Why would slowly rewriting it whole, or just parts, in Rust make it stop being Linux?
There is no “your” new rust kernel. There is a gigantic ship of Theseus that is the Linux kernel, and many parts of it are being rewritten, refactored, removed an added all the time by god knows how many different people. Some of those things will be done in rust.
Can we stop reacting to this the way conservatives react to gay people? Just let some rust exist. Nobody is forcing everyone to be gay, and nobody is forcing everybody to immediately abandon C and rewrite everything in rust.
the crew on the Ship of Theseus would like a word with you. Because if you strip out every subsystem and replace them with a different language, everyone would still call it Linux and it would still work as Linux.
Linux isn’t “a bunch of C code” it’s an API, an ABI, and a bunch of drivers bundled into a monorepo.
People are dumb as hell, it’s fucking open source, go maintain the c fork, and let the those who want to improve the fucking shit cve producing codebase make a rust fork. And see which one people will use, and we all know that the rust fork will have wider adoption, it’s a no brainer.
No one is forcing them to maintain the Linux kernel, no one is telling them to stop writing patches, they can’t because you can download the code and work on it as you like.
It’s people who know they will be irrelevant because they spent decades producing shit software, and they can’t even be bothered to learn a new language to improve stability and security for the whole fucking userbase. Give me a break, what a bunch of whiners.
This is such a dumb take. For as much as I’d like to have a safer language in the kernel you need the current developers, the “big heads” at least because they have a lot of niche knowledge about their domains and how they implementation works (regardless of language) People shouldn’t take shit like this from the ext4 developer, but it doesn’t mean we should start vilifying all of them.
This guy’s concerns are real and valid but were expressed with the maturity of a lunatic child, but they are not all like this.
Yes and the big heads in this case don’t want to share that knowledge, because why? Because they are treating the kernel like their pet project that they own and control, and they don’t wanna lose that control, rather looking at the bigger picture.
It’s kinda obvious that rust is the way forward as google has clearly shown, so why are they gatekeeping?
When did they refuse to share knowledge?
That was what he was talking about at the conference, he literally asked for help about how things work, so he could write better APIs that they are more comfortable using.
But the response was we don’t want to write rust.
So what’s the solution that doesn’t involve C programmers writing Rust?
There’s is no other way, C is a security issue - do you understand?
So you want to force C programmers to write Rust or GTFO.
If anything, the constant coddling of a few aging individuals within the kernel and the protection of their comforts is why Linux has been so slow to adopt technologies and paradigms that developers are begging for.
Linus complains of dev burnout starving the kernel of contributors, but the processes and technologies driving kernel development are antiquated, and the very suggestion of change is either discarded or makes you the target of a public shaming by Linus himself.
Nobody can maintan a fork of the linux kernel on their own or even with a team. It’s a HUGE task.
There already is rust in part of the linux kernel. It’s not a fork.
But I agree with your first statement, people are dumb as hell, me included lol
No shit
old white man scared of losing their jobs or their commits going insigificant…who cares. Lets move on.
Lemmy comment not mentioning the race of someone challenge (IMPOSSIBLE)
