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Eliminating Memory Safety Vulnerabilities at the Source | Google's use of Rust in Android's Linux kernel
(security.googleblog.com)
this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2024
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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I'm not sure where the Linux kernel part comes from, but if I open the article and search for "linux" or "kernel", there are no matches...
Android uses forked versions of the Linux kernel, based on Linux LTS versions. They added in Rust support in 2019 and most new code since then has been written in Rust in order to avoid memory safety vulnerabilities. And memory safety vulnerabilities have been significantly down since 2019.
Now that upstream Linux is adopting Rust, we should hopefully see a similar results. Though likely slower than Google (they went all-in on Rust) while upstream Linux new code will seemingly be mainly C for the foreseeable future.
is it? From what I read the old kernel developers are really opposing it
Linux support is definitely moving slower than the Rust team wants, but the team and Linus are still optimistic.