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Giving Rust a chance for in-kernel codecs

Video playback is undeniably one of the most important features in modern consumer devices. Yet, surprisingly, users are by and large unaware of the intricate engineering involved in the compression and decompression of video data, with codecs being left to find a delicate balance between image quality, bandwidth, and power consumption. In response to constant performance pressure, video codecs have become complex and hardware implementations are now common, but programming these devices is becoming increasingly difficult and fraught with opportunities for exploitation. I hope to convey how Rust can help fix this problem.

Yet, surprisingly, users are by and large unaware of the intricate engineering involved in the compression and decompression of video data, with codecs being left to find a delicate balance between image quality, bandwidth, and power consumption. So I went back to the drawing board and came up with a new, simpler proposal; it differs a bit from the general flow of the Rust-for-Linux community so far by realizing that we can convert error-prone driver sections without writing a whole layer of Rust bindings. The work being done by Miguel Ojeda and others in the Rust-for-Linux project has the potential to finally bring relief to problems such as complex locking, error handling, bounds checking, and hard-to-track ownership that span a large number of domains and subsystems.

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