Re: [PATCH 0/3] Rust XArray

[Daniel Almeida <daniel.almeida@collabora.com>]

Daniel,


> On 23 Sep 2026, at 18:00, Daniel Gomez <da.gomez@kernel.org> wrote:
> 
> We are evaluating Rust for the XArray to test if Rust delivers what it
> promises for a core kernel data structure, as a consequence of a page
> cache bug that was dormant for years, left users with a corrupted FS,
> was difficult to reproduce, and almost prevented the LBS work [1] from
> being merged. After looking at other XArray-related bugs, I think this
> particular one represents well the root cause of most XArray bugs:
> misuse of the API by its callers.
> 
> The XArray's main user is the page cache, but it has many other users
> and features, such as multi-index, RCU, etc. This initial support does
> not cover all these features and so, the initial evaluation targets
> are the ones that use the data structure in the simplest form. For this
> reason, I would like this series to be considered as a reference Rust
> implementation (experimental) [2] that we can merge in-tree to let users
> experiment and evaluate both implementations starting first from Rust
> users: null block driver and potentially drm gpu drivers such as tyr.

Thanks a lot for working on this! This will be very helpful for Tyr.

Give me some time to go over the code.


— Daniel