While not an official announcement, a senior Microsoft employee revealed recently that Rust code will soon be at the heart of the kernel as the tech giant looks to improve Windows 11"s security. Internal testing, so far, has shown promising results,and it could be on its way to Insiders in just a few weeks time.
Meanwhile, not to be outdone, Linux is also getting some improvements to Rust. The latest Linux patches reveal that kernel version 6.4 is getting more optimizations which will help to reduce the need for "unsafe" code. The patch says:
More additions to the Rust core. Importantly, this adds the pin-init API, which will be used by other abstractions, such as the synchronization ones added here too:
- pin-init API: a solution for the safe pinned initialization problem. This allows to reduce the need for "unsafe" code in the kernel when dealing with data structures that require a stable address.
There are many more additions in the pipeline and they can be viewed in the pull request here.
Aside from Rust, both Windows 11 and Linux are also getting some decent improvements in terms of file system performance. While there is ReFS to look forward to on the Windows side, Linux is getting some good improvements on F2FS, Btrfs, EXT4, as well as unofficial NTFS.