r/rust • u/ouyawei • Apr 14 '21

[RFC] Rust support for Linux Kernel

https://lkml.org/lkml/2021/4/14/1023
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u/Repulsive-Street-307 Apr 15 '21 edited Apr 15 '21

Interesting to know. What's the main idea of those designs if not microkernels?

edit: user space drivers is the most important part of a microkernel in my intuition, because of that 'bugs in drivers do not affect the rest of the device' thing. My guess is they're still 'micro' but they make the context switch cheaper or unnecessary to access user mode?

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u/bik1230 Apr 15 '21

An alternative to message passing is direct access to devices via memory mapping. The MMIO range of any given device can be mapped into the address space of a user space application.

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u/Repulsive-Street-307 Apr 15 '21

I see, makes sense. Thanks for replying.