Rust UEFI Firmware Targets Look For A Promotion To Tier-2

David Rheinsberg of Red Hat who is a contributor to systemd, BUS1, KMSCON, and other projects over the years is leading an effort seeking to get Rust's UEFI firmware targets promoted to a tier-2 class.

The Rust programming language currently supports UEFI targets for AArch64, i686, and x86_64 so that building Rust UEFI applications are possible. To enable Rust for firmware development, he's hoping to see those UEFI targets promoted from Rust's Tier-3 to Tier-2 support classifications. In addition to systemd development and other roles, David is one of the Rust UEFI target maintainers along with Nicholas Bishop of Google.

Rust Tier-3 is their lowest classification level for getting targets merged into upstream. But Tier-3 targets lack any official compiler builds in the Rust release channels, lacks Rust continuous integration (CI) guarantees, and forces users to use nightly/unstable compiler builds.

David Rheinsberg is hoping to get the Rust UEFI targets promoted to tier-2 so they can enjoy automatic builds via the Rust release channels and no longer requiring nightly/unstable builds. The automatic CI builds should also help ensure good support for those wanting to use the Rust programming language for UEFI firmware development. This promotion in turn should make it much easier to get started with using the Rust programming language for beginning work on UEFI system firmware development.

Rheinsberg summed up his proposal via this blog post. He also opened the Rust UEFI MCP with the compiler team in hopefully facilitating this promotion.