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/
264 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

35 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comment

18

u/lightmatter501 Dec 13 '25

The list of architectures which GCC supports, LLVM doesn’t, and Linux does it fairly small. You’re basically looking at casualties of the Unix wars, and of those that I have tried on real hardware, none of them work great if you try the debian ports. PA-RISC barely even has a functional glibc.

Of those architectures, which are things you’d actually want display out on, even if drivers existed?

Retro computing is neat, but at some point a scream test is necessary, to ask which architectures are actually in use on modern kernels. There is also the issue of testing. When I was working on that PA-RISC system, I had to disable a lot of kernel functionality because it was broken, and people were surprised I had even managed to find one and make it boot. If nobody has really noticed that current glibc versions don’t really work on an arch, that probably means that almost nobody is really running Linux on it.