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It makes me wonder, what was the point of introducing Rust into the kernel when they already have eBPF?

Couldn't they have just used the existing eBPF compiler for creating safe kernel code?

Maybe the distant future of the Linux kernel is for almost everything to compile down to eBPF bytecode except the part that runs the bytecode.

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That's a cool conjecture but it kind of misses the point of eBPF.

The point of it is that you can run user-defined programs while avoiding the costly context switch between user space and kernel space.

The kernel already is the kernel. Compiling kernel code to eBPF programs would offer seemingly no performance gains, since you're already in kernel space; there is no costly context switch to avoid.

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