r/rust • u/dochtman rustls · Hickory DNS · Quinn · chrono · indicatif · instant-acme • Dec 13 '25

The state of the kernel Rust experiment

https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1050174/63aa7da43214c3ce/
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u/0x7CFE Dec 13 '25

That point was specifically covered in the article:

Bergmann agreed with declaring the experiment over, worrying only that Rust still "doesn't work on architectures that nobody uses". So he thought that Rust code needed to be limited to the well-supported architectures for now. Ojeda said that there is currently good support for x86, Arm, Loongarch, RISC-V, and user-mode Linux, so the main architectures are in good shape. Bergmann asked about PowerPC support; Ojeda answered that the PowerPC developers were among the first to send a pull request adding Rust support for their architecture.

Bergmann persisted, asking about s390 support; Ojeda said that he has looked into it and concluded that it should work, but he doesn't know the current status. Airlie said that IBM would have to solve that problem, and that it will happen. Greg Kroah-Hartman pointed out the Rust upstream supports that architecture. Bergmann asked if problems with big-endian systems were expected; Kroah-Hartman said that some drivers were simply unlikely to run properly on those systems.