When did Linus become ok with Rust in the kernel?
Given that Rust can cause a panic, I thought he was adamantly against Rust for low level kernel support.
Given that Rust can cause a panic, I thought he was adamantly against Rust for low level kernel support.
To directly answer your question though. It's not that 'Rust memory allocations' panic. Rather it was the case that allocations widely used when the initiative was started could panic. This is being solved by writing a library with non-panicking memory allocations to be used in kernel development [1].
However, I'm not involved with this in any way, so I may be wrong.
Anyway, I don't see paniccing as something a Linux kernel must never ever do. After all, we are all familiar with kernel oopses and panics, so clearly the existing body code already does it some situations. Just have the Rust code do that, if it wasn't its current behavior.
One can argue Rust is one way to get rid of those panics/oops by e.g. statically guaranteeing a pointer is not null after a certain point.
He didn't. But he knows politics.