linux

> Is this mostly just a thing to get more young people interested in kernel development...allowing them to start out in less important areas and in a language they are passionate about? Not likely. At the moment you need to do extra work to get Rust working well. It's not exactly beginner friendly and doing work in the kernel, you'll need to dig into C anyway. > Or is this a serious proposal about the future of operating systems and other low level infrastructure code? Serious code already exists, so... Yes? > Do you just program everything in unsafe mode? What about runtimes? Why would you? You need that only when interfacing with something that can't hold the Rust compiler assumptions. See for example https://github.com/AsahiLinux/linux/blob/gpu/rebase-6.4/driv... The few places that need direct access / unsafe are almost all single-lin

I think the idea with the M-series laptops in particular is that you can drive the speakers at volumes that actually damage them very quickly ( see https://github.com/AsahiLinux/linux/issues/53 ). The idea AIUI is that you can use a DSP along with a physical model of the voice coil to get better sound than you would if the speakers were volume-limited. I don't know how common this arrangement is in other laptops, but it's the kind of hardware/software integration that Apple is known for.

I am using Asahi Linux and the GPU driver works great, it even supports OpenGL 3.1 (https://asahilinux.org/2023/06/opengl-3-1-on-asahi-linux/). Definitely not alpha, I would say it's close to a "release candidate". Many bugs got resolved, nothing much left (besides newer OpenGL and Vulkan of course, but current state is very stable): https://github.com/AsahiLinux/linux/issues/72

There aren't really any non-trivial mainline modules, since the Rust support is so new. There's the non-mainline Asahi M1 GPU driver though! It will eventually be mainlined, but IIRC some more Rust support code needs to be mainlined first. https://github.com/AsahiLinux/linux/tree/asahi/drivers/gpu/d...