Arm Helping With AArch64 Rust Linux Kernel Enablement

Much of the Rust programming language support/infrastructure for the Linux kernel thus far has been with an x86_64 focus while obviously AArch64 is an important target as well. It's nice to see Arm Limited engineers working on the Rust Linux kernel support for AArch64/ARM64.

Lead Rust for Linux developer Miguel Ojeda has already been carrying a patch to enable Rust support for AArch64 kernel builds while Jamie Cunliffe of Arm sent out a patch series today with a few more items for tidying up the AArch64 enablement for Rust code in the Linux kernel.

The patches enable Pointer Authentication and Branch Target Identification (PACBTI) support as part of the Rust build flags to match the C language options used within the kernel for Armv8 and newer builds. Also there is a patch disabling NEON and floating point target features to avoid using the FP/SIMD registers.

The Arm patches were sent out today as part of the "Rust enablement for AArch64" patch series on the rust-for-linux list.

The Rust for Linux kernel work continues progressing overall with more subsystems and driver developers expressing interest in writing future kernel code with Rust. Those wishing to track the latest Rust for Linux kernel development code can do so via this GitHub repository.