Podcast
Rust for Linux - Danilo Krummrich, Linux Kernel Maintainer
Bringing Rust into the Linux kernel is one of the most ambitious modernization efforts in open source history. The Linux kernel, with its decades of C code and deeply ingrained development practices, is now opening its doors to a memory-safe language. It’s the first time in over 30 years that a new programming language has been officially adopted for kernel development. But the journey is far from straightforward.
In this episode, we speak with Danilo Krummrich, Linux kernel maintainer and Rust for Linux core team member, about the groundbreaking work of integrating Rust into the Linux kernel. Among other things, we talk about the Nova GPU driver, a Rust-based successor to Nouveau for NVIDIA graphics cards, and discuss the technical challenges and cultural shifts required for large-scale Rust adoption in the kernel as well as the future of the Rust4Linux project.
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Show Notes
About Rust for Linux
Rust for Linux is a project aimed at bringing the Rust programming language into the Linux kernel. Started to improve memory safety and reduce vulnerabilities in kernel code, the project has been gradually building the infrastructure, abstractions, and tooling necessary for Rust to coexist with the kernel’s existing C codebase.
About Danilo Krummrich
Danilo Krummrich is a software engineer at Red Hat and a core contributor to the Rust for Linux project. In January 2025, he was officially added as a reviewer to the RUST entry in the kernel’s MAINTAINERS file, recognizing his expertise in developing Rust abstractions and APIs for kernel development. Danilo maintains the staging/dev and staging/rust-device branches and is the primary developer of the Nova GPU driver, a fully Rust-based driver for modern NVIDIA GPUs. He is also a maintainer of RUST [ALLOC] and several DRM-related kernel subsystems.
Links From The Episode
- AOSP - The Android Open Source Project
- Kernel Mailing Lists - Where the Linux development happens
- Miguel Ojeda - Rust4Linux maintainer
- Wedson Almeida Filho - Retired Rust4Linux maintainer
- noveau driver - The old driver for NVIDIA GPUs
- Vulkan - A low level graphics API
- Mesa - Vulkan and OpenGL implementation for Linux
- vtable - Indirect function call, a source of headaches in nouveau
- DRM - Direct Rendering Manager, Linux subsystem for all things graphics
- Monolithic Kernel - Linux’ kernel architecture
- The Typestate Pattern in Rust - A very nice way to model state machines in Rust
- pinned-init - The userspace crate for pin-init
- rustfmt - Free up space in your brain by not thinking about formatting
- kunit - Unit testing framework for the kernel
- Rust core crate - The only part of the Rust Standard Library used in the Linux kernel
- Alexandre Courbot - NVIDIA employed co-maintainer of nova-core
- Greg Kroah-Hartman - Linux Foundation fellow and major Linux contributor
- Dave Airlie - Maintainer of the DRM tree
- vim - not even neovim
- mutt - classic terminal e-mail client
- aerc - a pretty good terminal e-mail client
- Rust4Linux Zulip - The best entry point for the Rust4Linux community
Official Links
About corrode
"Rust in Production" is a podcast by corrode, a company that helps teams adopt Rust. We offer training, consulting, and development services to help you succeed with Rust. If you want to learn more about how we can help you, please get in touch.