373
'Maybe the problem is you' ... Linus Torvalds wades into Linux kernel Rust driver drama
(www.theregister.com)
this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2025
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I am so glad Linus just came out and said it. I was pretty upset at Hector too in the other thread the other day, and I especially didn't appreciate a call to remove a major developer from the kernel because Hector wasn't getting his way. Very militant action on Hector's part where it just wasn't necessary.
Hector, if you're reading this, communication skills are just as if not more important than your Rust development skills, and frankly your communication skills lack.
You seem to be in the loops of the linux kernel?
If so, ive known hector from way before when we was part of f0f, or TT as they were known before, doing wii homebrew work.
What you describe is what my experience was with him 14 years ago too. The guy is smart, he has a very good skill set and knowledge, but his communication skills were lacking back then too.
Granted, both he and myself were still teenagers and students and we were wild, but i had always assumed he grew up a bit since then...
What you said is spot on, and i hope he does read both of these. And if he does :
Marcan, you might not know who i am anymore, but ffs man. Dont screw up your love for all of these by keep kicking the hornets nests. You did it with devkitpro, emudevs when the nier news dropped and with rossman too. Stop it, its for your own good.
I decided to read replies: wierd, they suggest accusation is overblown.
I decided to read context: WTF is this?! Unholy shit, dear Faust, what did I read? What a deflection!
I thought I was terminally online with mental disorders, but this makes me look most grass-touching and sanest person.
I can understand their frustration, having multiple other rust for Linux project maintainers quit over nontechnical rust aversion.
And Linus continues to (democratically?) avoid the subject with this response.
As a rust for Linux volunteer you have to be incredibly demoralized reading this mess almost every other month.
Part of why linux has been a successful long term project is by making decisions conservatively. Other projects like cURL do the same. Incremental improvements over time.
It seems like there is a culture clash with the rust devs who are pushing for changes faster than the long term project maintainers are comfortable with.
@semperverus Just from the small interactions I had with Hector on mastodon I can see he gets very unreasonable about small things and does not accept the possibility that he may be wrong, despite evidence. So leaving linux and mastodon because of rust is totally on brand for him.
Hector has a rap sheet of crash outs and drama.
So now we've lost a very good developer, and the question of rust in the kernel remains unresolved. This is the worst possible outcome.
Part of being a good developer is the "working well with other human beings" part. Linus himself took a hiatus to improve himself in this area.
Another part of being a good developer is to work within and adapting to the frameworks of an existing project, especially if you are joining at a later point. In this context, it would be the R4L folks joining the project known as "the Linux kernel."
Hector failed on both counts. He has programming skills, but that's not all that's required.
And this could also apply to all the existing devs who are fighting tooth and nail to keep rust out.
Sure, and part of being a good manager is to, you know, manage. It shouldn't have gotten to the point that marcan is going outside the list to try to get something done. Linus (or someone else with authority, I'm not familiar with who else is managing it) should have stepped in much earlier to head off the drama. It was a very simple question.
Rust in the kernel is already established and part of the mainline kernel. It's extremely pretty and wholly inappropriate to reject code just because it's written in rust.
If you had read Christoph's reasoning, it wasn't "just because it's written in Rust." He actually gave some decent technical reasoning for it that went beyond his original personal outburst (which I hold him to the same standard as Hector for, but he did shore up later and fixed his communication).
How do you figure?
The only two "technical" arguments I could see were firstly that code should
which unless I'm missing something boils down to "I don't speak Rust", and secondly that
which unless I'm missing something boils down to "I don't speak Rust", because ain't nobody trying to add any other languages to the Linux code base.
Surely this can't be the "decent technical reasoning" you are referring to? I have to admit I don't follow kernel development that closely, but I was under the impression that integrating Rust into the code base was a long discussed initiative having the "official" blessing of the higher ups among the maintainers by now, so it seems odd to see it opposed in such harsh terms by a subsystem maintainer here:
You and i read different things. I hated how he worded them, but his arguments at greppable and understandable are valid arguments that go beyond rust and if he can read it or not or refuses to.
Mixing languages in a part of a project brings complexity and is often a huge ass nono because it makes things unreadable and hard to manage on a large scale.
He also argues that a c interface exists to connect 2 parts of a system. The person that changes the interface should not have to alter the users of that interface, if they do then you get intertwined dependencies, which is a huge ass red flag for developers that something has gone terrible wrong and the project is not going to scale or will be easy to change.
So if he changes the interface, the rust team will need to fix it, specially since they are the minority.
That also doesnt mean he can change it in whatever way without worry, it is an interface change, that needs discussions and approvals ahead of time ofc.
Apparently we did.
I'm failing to see how Rust code is not greppable unless you don't speak Rust.
An argument which I would acknowledge, but if the decision to do this has been made by the group it still is weird to see it blocked by an individual.
Nobody asked Hellwig to do this, in fact Krummrich said several times they would maintain the interface consuming the C code themselves. They just want one common interface for all Rust drivers, instead of replicating the same code in each driver. Which Hellwig never gives a substantial reply to.
Again not how I'm reading that thread. As Krummrich put it:
Most full of shit comment in the thread
The times when a single developer was important to Linux were in the 90s.
I don't think this is the worst outcome. It would have been worse if he was the face of Rust in Linux and it died out over ten years instead of one.
That being said, hopefully it can get a fresh start.
What Rust. It's never going to happen the old timers are fighting like hell to keepmit out.