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You make two short-sighted assumptions:

1. "Nobody compiles a kernel these days". Sure, maybe not for daily use for most, but lots of people do for work and experimentation. Also, Gentoo.

2. "Everybody runs a modern CPU". Plenty of people still run decade-old hardware, and even older, because it works and in that decade objectives of PC have not significantly changed, so why would hardware?

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I agree with you, but:

This driver is almost certainly not targeting 10 year old hardware.

So when you define your kernel config, you wouldn't include this driver. The new code would be entirely skipped over at compile time.

(Still think "rewrite everything in rust to solve all our problems" is a bit dumb.)

I honestly do not think the Linux Kernel team should worry too much about the very small niche of people that insist on compiling on slow CPUs. Cross compiling exists, and 99% of Linux users run a precompiled vmlinuz binary.

On the other hand, the Rust language team should do their utmost to improve the speed of their compiler.

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