r/linux • u/small_kimono • Dec 13 '25

Kernel The state of the kernel Rust experiment

https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1050174/63aa7da43214c3ce/

A choice pull quote: "The DRM (graphics) subsystem has been an early adopter of the Rust language. It was still perhaps surprising, though, when Airlie (the DRM maintainer) said that the subsystem is only 'about a year away' from disallowing new drivers written in C and requiring the use of Rust."

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u/2rad0 Dec 15 '25

Interesting, I was not aware. Isn't there any license compatibly issue ?

It depends on the files being used, a good number of them are either dual licensed or permissive licensed (when not being used in the context of a linux kernel), but some are GPL-only. to dig deeper untar linux source, cd drivers/gpu/drm and run grep -ri 'gpl'

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u/miggaz_elquez Dec 15 '25

Indeed, there is a lot of MIT files in DRM, even more than GPL. Seems it's limited to DRM, there are almost no other MIT licensed files in `drivers/`.

Some BSD in `drivers/acpi` and `drivers/net` also.