Zack's Kernel News

Article from Issue 302/2026

Author(s): Zack Brown

Chronicler Zack Brown reports on the little links that bring us closer within the Linux kernel community.

Rust Formatting Issues

As the Rust world integrates more and more into Linux kernel development, and as Linux moves away from being a C-only software project, it's inevitable that we'll see various conflicts and discoveries, as both groups continue to get used to each other. At this point, it seems very unlikely that Linus will ever change his mind about Rust and decide to rip it all out of the kernel and go back to C exclusively. He's clearly seen something in this new language that he likes more than any other that he's considered letting into the kernel through the years, including C++. That said, there's still a lot of handshaking and handholding to be done before the situation normalizes.

This time around, Dave Airlie submitted a massive merge request to Linus Torvalds, containing a variety of patches from many developers. He also said, "The other big thing here is rust stuff. There is a pin-init rework which may also be merged in other trees (I can't remember). Then dma, device and drm stuff. This also has updates to the nova-core, nova-drm drivers and introduces a skeleton driver Tyr for ARM Mali, which will be constructed upstream as the rust pieces are merged."

Linus had no objection to any of this. What he did object to was the formatting of how libraries were included in source files. In Rust, libraries are called "crates," and you include one with a line like

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