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Rust for Filesystems

At the 2024 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit, Wedson Almeida Filho and Kent Overstreet led a combined storage and filesystem session on using Rust for Linux filesystems. Back in December 2023, Almeida had posted an RFC patch set with some Rust abstractions for filesystems, which resulted in some disagreement over the approach.

The overall idea is to have a more productive filesystem-development experience, with less time spent on debugging problems that the compiler could find, and with fewer memory-related vulnerabilities overall. Overstreet noted that Christian Brauner and Alice Ryhl have helped to improve the abstractions a great deal since the first posting; in particular, there are things he has learned about reference counts based on how they are being handled by the Rust code. Allocating pain Part of the problem, Ted Ts'o said, is that there is an effort to get "everyone to switch over to the religion" of Rust; that will not happen, he said, because there are 50+ different filesystems in Linux that will not be instantaneously converted.

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