Introduction Following on from Carefully But Purposefully Oxidising Ubuntu, Ubuntu will be the first major Linux distribution to adopt sudo-rs as the default implementation of sudo, in partnership with the Trifecta Tech Foundation The change will be effective from the release of Ubuntu 25.10. You can see the Trifecta Tech Foundation’s announcement here. What is sudo-rs? sudo-rs is a reimplementation of the traditional sudo tool, written in Rust. It’s being developed by the Trifecta Tech Founda...
In order to be a viable general use OS, probably yes. It would be an enormous amount of effort to reach a decent range of hardware compatibility without reusing the work that has already been done. Maybe someone will try something more ambitious, like writing a rust kernel with C interoperability and a linux-like API so we can at least port linux drivers to it as a “temporary” solution.
I remember there being a bit of talk around a Linux driver compatibility layer for Redox in the future, but I can’t find anything about it, so I could be misremembering.
What do you mean by “C interoperability and a linux-like API”, exactly?
C is pretty much the standard for FFI, you can use C libraries with Rust and Redox even has their own C standard library implementation.
Linux does not have a stable kernel API as far as I know, only userspace API & ABI compatibility is guaranteed.
C is pretty much the standard for FFI, you can use C libraries with Rust and Redox even has their own C standard library implementation.
Right, but I’m talking specifically about a kernel which supports building parts of it in C. Rust as a language supports this but you also have to set up all your processes (building, testing, doc generation) to work with a mixed code base. To be clear, I don’t image that this part is that hard. When I called this a “more ambitious” approach, I was mostly referring to the effort of maintaining forks of linux drivers and API compatibility.
Linux does not have a stable kernel API as far as I know, only userspace API & ABI compatibility is guaranteed.
Ugh, I forgot about that. I wonder how much effort it would be to keep up with the linux API changes. I guess it depends on how many linux drivers you would use, since you don’t need 100% API compatibility. You only need whatever is used by the drivers you care about.
In order to be a viable general use OS, probably yes. It would be an enormous amount of effort to reach a decent range of hardware compatibility without reusing the work that has already been done. Maybe someone will try something more ambitious, like writing a rust kernel with C interoperability and a linux-like API so we can at least port linux drivers to it as a “temporary” solution.
I remember there being a bit of talk around a Linux driver compatibility layer for Redox in the future, but I can’t find anything about it, so I could be misremembering.
What do you mean by “C interoperability and a linux-like API”, exactly?
Right, but I’m talking specifically about a kernel which supports building parts of it in C. Rust as a language supports this but you also have to set up all your processes (building, testing, doc generation) to work with a mixed code base. To be clear, I don’t image that this part is that hard. When I called this a “more ambitious” approach, I was mostly referring to the effort of maintaining forks of linux drivers and API compatibility.
Ugh, I forgot about that. I wonder how much effort it would be to keep up with the linux API changes. I guess it depends on how many linux drivers you would use, since you don’t need 100% API compatibility. You only need whatever is used by the drivers you care about.