netdev - Re: Seeking guidance on Rust porting for network driver as a learning project

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Message-ID: <e219a202-0e02-4802-bba4-da8d15624113@lunn.ch>
Date: Sat, 16 Aug 2025 02:30:42 +0200
From: Andrew Lunn <andrew@...n.ch>
To: Guilherme Novaes Lima <acc.guilhermenl@...il.com>
Cc: netdev@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Seeking guidance on Rust porting for network driver as a
 learning project

On Fri, Aug 15, 2025 at 08:27:53PM -0300, Guilherme Novaes Lima wrote:
> Hi Andrew,
> 
> > Another idea might be an Ethernet switch which is not supported by DSA
> > at the moment.
> 
> Thank you for your reply. The ideal would be to do something simple, the actual implementation of the driver would be the secondary focus of the research. What I originally intended to do was to port over r8169, I didn’t have switches in mind. Do you think that would be too hard? Sorry for my inexperience, I’m a complete noob when it comes to kernel / driver development, so I thank you again for your patience and generosity.

Any code you produce for the r8169 will not be merged. We don't want
reimplementations of existing drivers. r8169 is widely used, and
currently Rust only supports a subset of architectures. It makes no
sense to have a minimal Rust driver for a few architectures and a full
featured driver for all architectures. This is why i suggested writing
a driver for something which currently does not have a driver. If
Linux currently does not support some hardware, we don't care too much
that a Rust driver works for a subset of architectures. Its better
than nothing.

	Andrew