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Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin resigns from Linux kernel

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Re: Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin resigns from Linux kernel

#901

Post by geodel »

4bpp wrote: post #590
gary_0 wrote: post #27

The Rust drama is an uncommon failure of leadership for Torvalds. Instead of decisively saying "no, never" or "yes, make it so," he has consistently equivocated on the Rust issue. Given the crisis of confidence among a sizeable (and very vocal) contingent of the Linux community, that decision has backfired horribly. And it's quite out of character for Linus not to have a blazingly clear opinion. (We all know his stan…

I do wonder if Linus is actually opposed to Rust in the kernel, but for whatever reason thinks that he can't afford to openly ban it or do anything beyond deniably letting it be obstructed by maintainers. The Rust language project and community are political and politically savvy in ways that few other open-source infrastructure projects are - it seems conceivable that if he declared against it, this might result in…

Very reasonable take. I feel the same. Any kind of real or perceived attack on Rust is heresy today.

Re: Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin resigns from Linux kernel

#902

Post by dharmab »

knighthack wrote: post #754
zaptheimpaler wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Besides the current drama, I'm glad someone of his stature agrees with and can call out the horrible processes and tooling involved in the kernel. Using email and a pile of hacks to mess around with patches just sounds nuts and makes it so much harder to understand or contribute. I don't think decentralized necessitates such a terrible workflow - you can run a local website with a distributed DB, distributed git forg…

As someone who has never used mailing lists before (for software development), how much harder/less advantageous it is to migrate to an issues or thread-based approach, like with Github? And why not?

The short version is:

- Distributing patches via email is more scalable than web hosting. Even GitHub could not host the level of activity happening on the LKML mailing list

- Web hosting has a variety of access and legal problems when working with international teams; email crosses borders more easily

- Email is a decentralized and distributed system that prevents any single company from controlling a project's development infrastructure (release infrastructure is another story, but multiple companies will generally manage their own release process anyway)

Re: Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin resigns from Linux kernel

#903

Post by leoh »

Not wanting 2 languages is ridiculous. Only one of them is actually safe. Whatever Linus thinks, empowering someone to say “no” to “two languages” is pretty idiotic; if someone did that to me, I wouldn’t go to social media to bitch about it, but I can sure as heck sympathize with the sentiment.

Whoever owns DMA or whatever and rejected rust out of hand like this should frankly be _forced_ to resign. This is truly arrogant and egotistical behavior, almost certainly contingent upon FUD and insecurity and laziness about not just learning Rust.

Good grief, last time I feel excited about submitting a kernel patch; what a ridiculous situation.

Re: Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin resigns from Linux kernel

#904

Post by fud101 »

mperham wrote: post #815
fud101 wrote: post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

because that's what the world needs, an obscure half assed implementation of unix? why not innovate and come up with a new paradigm instead. No one is asking for this.

It sounds like you don’t know anything about Redox.

I don't care, any OS that claims inspiration from Plan9 is doomed from the start, it's Unix done right which is exactly the worst possible thing.

Re: Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin resigns from Linux kernel

#905

Post by steveklabnik »

mmooss wrote: post #900
steveklabnik wrote: post #892

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are drivers that exist only in Rust, so any distro that wants to support that hardware will. Like the Apple A3 silicon graphics driver. Iirc red hat and nvidia are also working on some Rust based drivers.

Do the Rust drivers provide significant benefits over C equivalents (or over typical C drivers), enough to make it worth switching? Rust may have to really prove itself with results. And why shouldn't it?

There are no C equivalents for the drivers I’m talking about.

Re: Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin resigns from Linux kernel

#906

Post by mmooss »

steveklabnik wrote: post #905
mmooss wrote: post #900

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do the Rust drivers provide significant benefits over C equivalents (or over typical C drivers), enough to make it worth switching? Rust may have to really prove itself with results. And why shouldn't it?

There are no C equivalents for the drivers I’m talking about.

I got that - that's why I added the parenthetical. My point was the second sentence. Anyway, thanks for the input about the drivers.

And for what it's worth, I expect Rust would offer significant improvements.

Re: Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin resigns from Linux kernel

#907

Post by chii »

metaltyphoon wrote: post #769
coliveira wrote: post #757

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C and Unix have stood the test of time. It has been 50 years since they were designed, this is a long time in terms on computing. It is not unreasonable to think that they will stay for another 50 years.

If other, safer language would have existed the same time as C, I don’t think it would have stood the time as you say.

that's just hindsight. You can also argue the same for the dvorak keyboard vs qwerty. And yet, qwerty stood the test of time.

Momentum and legacy is hard to displace, when the new fangled thing attemping to be an improvement is not proven, and has unknown unknowns.

Re: Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin resigns from Linux kernel

#908

Post by Topgamer7 »

adager wrote: post #545

Marcan hasn't actually resigned. He's still posting on the LKML under a well-known alias. See https://lkml.org/lkml/2025/2/7/15 for example.

I always enjoyed watching Marcan's streams. But I couldn't do Lina's, only because the high pitched voice changing was grating.

Re: Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin resigns from Linux kernel

#909

Post by jodrellblank »

quotemstr wrote: post #572
mperham wrote: post #311

By the time Rust is welcome in the Linux kernel, projects like Redox will be full fledged competitors. I'd bet Hector would be welcomed there. https://www.redox-os.org

It's taken Wayland 16 years to become a serious alternative to X11. You think a whole kernel can do it faster? Well, with AGI...

Can't be many years until we can take the first ever version of Linux kernel, ask an LLM to port it to Rust, spin it up in QEMU and re-prompt until it works, then feed in every patch set and ask the LLM to add these changes to the Rust version, ... repeat for 30 years of patches until the full kernel is rewritten in Rust.

Re: Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin resigns from Linux kernel

#910

Post by ActorNightly »

codys wrote: post #397
ActorNightly wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the structure of the linux kernel, the nature of kernels in general, and the ways one performs automated verification of computer code. Automated verification (including as done by rust in it's compiler) does not involve anything popularly known as AI, and automated verification as it exists today is more complete for rust than for any other system (because no other widely us…

>Human validation is insufficient and error prone,

Basically, if you assume thats impossible for humans to be correct, or that its impossible to write correct memory safe C code, you start down the path that leads to things like Java, Haskell, and now Rust. And then when nobody takes you seriously, you wonder why - well, its because you are telling people who know how to write correct and memory safe C code that we are insufficient and error prone

>Kernel modules aren't that special.

By definition, they interface with the core kernel code. They are not core kernel code

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