Kernel watch
Jon Masters keeps up with all the latest happenings in the Linux kernel, so you don’t have to.
L inus Torvalds announced Linux 6.3-rc1 ,noting that it “was quite nice” to see how the two-week “merge window” (period of time during which disruptive changes are allowed into the kernel) went smoothly following “several releases where the merge windows had something odd going on”. He was also pleased by how many patches had been posted early as opposed to at the last minute.
“While Rust may be a ‘safe’ language, Linux is written in C, which decidedly is not.“
Meanwhile, Thorsten Leemhuis continues tracking regressions against the released Linux 6.2, which has already had a number of stable kernel updates from Greg KH. Linux 6.2 brought with it initial support for the Rust programming language. This was simultaneously surprising and not surprising in the least. Surprising in the sense that things happened relatively quickly – after all, Linux only just recently mandated C language support that is more than a decade old – and yet not surprising because Rust is the language du jour. This is largely because Rust intends to be a language that mandates and enforces what is known as memory safety: references always point to valid memory thanks to the concept of a borrow checker that tracks the lifetime of objects.