Re: [PATCH 0/6] Initial Rust V4L2 support

[Miguel Ojeda]

On Wed, Apr 26, 2023 at 3:37 PM Enrico Weigelt, metux IT consult
<lkml@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> As already said in my other mail, one major problem IMHO is (recent
> enough) toolchain availability for the major distros and package build
> systems - including the embedded ones (ptxdist, buildroot, bitbake,
> ...).
>
> IMHO, those who want Rust in the kernel, should take care of this first.
> (and no: asking to download some precompiled binary from somewhere is
> not any acceptable solution)

Some distributions already provide up-to-date Rust versions compiled
by themselves. Those should work if we start tracking the latest
version, which is what I discussed above.

You can, of course, do it yourself too and build the compiler
yourself. Other that that, if you are not OK with third-party
binaries, or binaries we could potentially upload to kernel.org, there
is little we can do until the minimum version arrives to your favorite
distribution.

Having said that, we still need to declare a minimum version, and for
that, extra funding or engineer-hours would be helpful. If your
organization/company is up for it, please contact me.

> ACK. Maybe those folks could set up some CIs for at least building and
> deploying the Rust patches on as many distros as possible - hopefully
> before they're sent to lkml.

I am unsure what you are asking for. Testing patches for the Rust
subsystem? We already do that, of course, and some independent CIs and
companies have already started building with Rust some configs (e.g.
KernelCI and 0-Day).

If you are concerned about distributions breaking their toolchains,
well, sure, we could also test their packages. But it would be best
that, instead, distributions looking to support kernel developers set
up a test on their side, since they are the ones deciding what to do
with their toolchain packages.

I talked with a few distributions' maintainers about this lately, and
most of them were very helpful, so they may be interested in
supporting kernel developers using their distribution for development.
Would that help?

Cheers,
Miguel