While there’s been no official announcement, a senior Microsoft employee recently revealed that Rust code will soon be at the core of the kernel as the tech giant looks to improve Windows 11’s security. Internal testing has, so far, shown promising results, and it could be on its way to the mainstream in just a few weeks.
Meanwhile, not to be outdone, Linux is also getting some improvements in Rust. The latest Linux patch shows that kernel version 6.4 is getting more optimizations that will help reduce the need for “unsafe” code. patch says:
Further additions to the rust cover. Importantly, it binds to the pin-init API, which will be used by other abstractions, such as the concurrency also included here:
– pin-init API: Fix for secure pin initialization issue. This allows reducing the need for ‘unsafe’ code in the kernel when working with data structures that require a static address.
There are many more additions in the pipeline and they can be viewed. In the pull request here.
Apart from Rust, both Windows 11 and Linux are getting some nice improvements in terms of file system performance. While there is ReFS to wait on the Windows side, Linux is getting some nice improvements over F2FS, Btrfs, EXT4 as well as the unofficial NTFS.