I don't see why it's so important to rewrite parts of the kernel in rust, or why Drew is so sympathetic to the cause. The linux project uses static analysis tools which provide some of what rust guarantees (outside of unsafe).
The language isn't the problem, it's the architecture. In Linux, all of the drivers run with the rest of the kernel. A bad driver can take down the whole thing, or perform arbitrary badness.
In Drew's own Helios microkernel, the architecture is right, and it's ready to have folks start piling on drivers in user-space. Those drivers can be written in pretty much any low level language that can produce ELF binaries.
It's surely a better path forward to slap a Linux syscall API on top of Helios + some new drivers than to clone the whole linux system architecture in another programming language. At least then, we would have gained something tangible (drivers can't ruin the kernel). Instead of having another Linux written in a different language, with all the same design flaws.
The language isn't the problem, it's the architecture. In Linux, all of the drivers run with the rest of the kernel. A bad driver can take down the whole thing, or perform arbitrary badness.
In Drew's own Helios microkernel, the architecture is right, and it's ready to have folks start piling on drivers in user-space. Those drivers can be written in pretty much any low level language that can produce ELF binaries.
It's surely a better path forward to slap a Linux syscall API on top of Helios + some new drivers than to clone the whole linux system architecture in another programming language. At least then, we would have gained something tangible (drivers can't ruin the kernel). Instead of having another Linux written in a different language, with all the same design flaws.