In addition to a lot of rust code merged last week for Linux 6.18, more Rust code has since landed by way of the char/misc pull request.
The char/misc pull request merged recently for Linux 6.18 Git includes Google’s Binder driver now written in Rust. This is the successor to their C-based Binder driver long part of the Linux kernel and used by Android devices. Both the C and Rust versions of Binder will exist within the Linux kernel for a few cycles while verifying the Rust-based driver is working out effectively and without any broken user-space software. The C code will eventually be removed but for now developers at kernel build time can choose which Binder driver to target on Android.
The misc driver Rust bindings have also been updated with read/write support, so that you can now write “norma misc drivers in Rust fully”, including updates to the sample Rust driver.
Linux 6.18 char/misc also landed the initial framework for USB driver Rust bindings. Greg Kroah-Hartman explained in the pull request:
“Initial framework for USB driver rust bindings, which are disabled for now in the build, due to limited support, but coming in through this tree due to dependencies on other rust binding changes that were in here. I’ll be enabling these back on in the build in the usb.git tree after -rc1 is out so that developers can continue to work on these in linux-next over the next development cycle.”
More details on the Rust USB driver support in the prior article Patches Posted To Allow Writing USB Rust Drivers For Linux.
Plus lots of other random driver updates in general for the char/misc pull. See the pull request for the full list of the since-merged char/misc changes.
