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Rusted Kernel and Torvalds' Views About It

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Saturday 2nd of October 2021 10:20:21 PM Filed under
Linux
  • Paul E. Mc Kenney: Rusting the Linux Kernel: Compiler Writers Hate Dependencies (Address/Data)

    An address dependency involves a load whose return value directly or indirectly determines the address of a later load or store, which results in the earlier load being ordered before the later load or store. A data dependency involves a load whose return value directly or indirectly determine the value stored by a later store, which results in the load being ordered before the store. These are used heavily by RCU. Although they are not quite as fragile as control dependencies, compilers still do not know about them. Therefore, care is still required, as can be seen in the rcu_dereference.rst Linux-kernel coding guidelines. As with control dependencies, address and data dependencies are very low cost, so they are used heavily in the Linux kernel via rcu_dereference() and friends.

  • Paul E. Mc Kenney: Rusting the Linux Kernel: Compiler Writers Hate Dependencies (Control)

    At the assembly language level on many weakly ordered architectures, a conditional branch acts as a very weak, very cheap, but very useful memory-barrier instruction. It orders any load whose return value feeds into the condition codes before all stores that execute after the branch instruction completes, whether the branch is taken or not. ARMv8 also has a conditional-move instruction (CSEL) that provides similar ordering.

    Because the ordering properties of the conditional branch involve dependencies from the load to the branch and from the branch to the store, and because the branch is a control-flow instruction, this ordering is said to be due to a control dependency.

    Because compilers do not understand them, control dependencies are quite fragile, as documented by the many cautionary tales in the Linux kernel's memory-barriers.txt documentation (search for the "CONTROL DEPENDENCIES" heading). But they are very low cost, so they are used on a few critically important fastpaths in the Linux kernel.

  • Paul E. Mc Kenney: Rusting the Linux Kernel: Compiler Writers Hate Dependencies (OOTA)

    Out-of-thin-air (OOTA) values are a troubling theoretical problem, but thus far do not actually occur in practice. In the words of the Bard: "It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

    But what is life without a little sound and fury? Besides, "mere theory" can loom large for those creating tools to analyze software. This post therefore gives a brief introduction to OOTA, and then provides some simple practical solutions, along with some difficult ones.

  • Paul E. Mc Kenney: Can Rust Code Own Sequence Locks?

    Sequence locks vaguely resemble reader-writer locks except that readers cannot block writers. If a writer runs concurrently with a reader, that reader is forced to retry its critical section. If a reader successfully completes its critical section (there were no concurrent writers), then its accesses will have been data-race free. Of course, an incessant stream of writers could starve all readers, and the Linux-kernel sequence-lock implementation provides extensions to deal with this in cases where incessant writing is a possibility. The usual approach is to instead arrange things so that writers are never incessant.

  • Linus Torvalds On Community, Rust and Linux's Longevity

    "I really love C," Torvalds said at one point. "I think C is a great language, and C is, to me, is really a way to control the hardware at a fairly low level..."

  • Linus Torvalds on Community, Rust and Linux’s Longevity

    This week saw the annual check-in with Linux creator Linus Torvalds at the Open Source Summit North America, this year held in Seattle (as well as virtually).

    Torvalds took the stage Tuesday in the ballroom at the Hyatt Regency Seattle for the event’s traditional half-hour of questions from Dirk Hohndel, an early Linux contributor (now also the chief open source officer and vice president at VMware) in an afternoon keynote session.

    The ceremony opened by acknowledging a special moment in time with a birthday cake ceremoniously delivered to Torvalds to mark Linux’s 30th anniversary, drawing a round of applause from the audience. Hohndel added he was offering 30th-birthday wishes “to all of the kernel developers — it really is a community also.”

»

More on that Torvalds appearance

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Monday 4th of October 2021 07:40:19 PM.
  • Linus Torvalds: Juggling chainsaws and building Linux

    Thirty years ago, give or take, Linus Torvalds created Linux. At the Linux Foundation's Open Source Summit last week, Torvalds talked with his good friend and VMware VP and chief open-source officer Dirk Hohndel about Linux's history.

    First things first, they talked about the actual date of Linux's birthday. Hohndel noted that Torvalds "has redefined the birthday of Linux everyone used to use -- August 25 -- and then said, 'well, actually it's September'." Indeed Torvalds and I have talked about this very point before, and you can choose between four dates for Linux's "official" birthday.

Sold to Rust (Monopolies and Censorship of Community)

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Monday 4th of October 2021 10:12:13 PM.
  • Linus Torvalds on 30 years of Linux, Rust and the open-source community

    The operating system that powers more than 90% of the world’s top servers and cloud infrastructure as well as the internet, Android smartphones, supercomputers, connected cars and the International Space Station was almost named “Freax.”

    “I think I emailed five people about the 0.0 release,” said Linus Torvalds (pictured, left), the inventor of Linux, who recalled that a colleague changed the name almost immediately. “I am eternally grateful to other people for having more taste than I did.”

  • Paul E. Mc Kenney: Can Rust Code Own RCU?

    Read-copy update (RCU) vaguely resembles a reader-writer lock, but one in which readers do not exclude writers. This change in semantic permits RCU readers to be exceedingly fast and scalable. In fact, in the most aggressive case, rcu_read_lock() and rcu_read_unlock() generate no code, and rcu_dereference() emits but a single load instruction. This most aggressive case is achieved in production via Linux-kernel CONFIG_PREEMPT_NONE=y builds. Additional information on RCU is presented at the end of this post.

  • McKenney: So You Want to Rust the Linux Kernel?

    Paul McKenney has started a blog series on Rust for the Linux kernel. He has posted six of a planned 11 articles, though several are labeled as "under construction".

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