It is always interesting to hear what Linus Torvalds is thinking, and it's always about Linux, well nearly always. Find out what is going on before it happens in this recent interview.

Linus has been having "fireside" chats with Dirk Hohndel for some time now and two new ones have been recorded this year, at the Open Source Summit North America in Seattle and the Open Source Summit in China.

The Seattle interview is interesting because it highlights some of the problems with non-open and open source hardware and how this makes it harder to create reliable operating systems.

Right at the start Linus bemoans the fact that building a kernel is made more difficult by the secrecy of the hardware companies. As a programmer working mostly with low level hardware, I have to agree. Even details of the latest Raspberry Pi 5 are difficult to find without a lot of skulduggery and reverse engineering. If hardware were open source, then open source software would be more reliable and better performing. However Linus still thinks that Risc V, the hope for open source hardware, will probably make all the same mistakes.

The China interview is timely because Linux seems to be at some sort of crossroads with the attempted introduction of Rust into the Linux kernel. Recently Wedson Almeida Filho, a Microsoft engineer and one of the  Rust for Linux kernel maintainers, decided he had had enough and stepped down from the project, claiming that the C people were basically protecting their turf and not playing ball with efforts to rewrite their code in Rust. I can see their point but as as Filho says in his note:

"I truly believe the future of kernels is with memory-safe languages. I am no visionary but if Linux doesn't internalize this, I'm afraid some other kernel will do to it what it did to Unix."

Take a look at the China interview, or if you are too busy you can read some of the highlights below:

After talking for a while about the old days and the fact that the Linux project has been going on a while the subject turns to security and then Rust. Commenting on the slow adoption of Rust:

 "... a large part of it is admittedly been a lot of oldtime kernel developers are so use to C and really don't know Rust - they are not exactly excited about have to learn a whole new lanuage that in some respects is totally different. So there has been som push back on Rust for that reason."

He also thinks that the tools weren't up to it, but that they are now. This was before Filho quit so it seems he was exactly right.

Given Linus's commitment to C, I believe he thinks in the language, his support for Rust is a brave but necessary move.

•  Harry Fairhead is the author of Applying C For The IoT With Linux and Raspberry Pi IoT in C with Linux Driversand co-author of Raspberry Pi IoT In Python Using Linux Drivers.  

More Information

Keynote: Linus Torvalds, Creator of Linux & Git, in Conversation with Dirk Hohndel

Keynote: Linus Torvalds, Creator of Linux & Git, in Conversation with Dirk Hohndel

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