"D for a @safer Linux Kernel" poster presentation at APLAS

[RazvanN]

On Thursday, 3 October 2019 at 07:13:05 UTC, Arun Chandrasekaran 
wrote:
> On Friday, 27 September 2019 at 09:26:22 UTC, RazvanN wrote:
>> Hello all,
>>
>> Alexandru Militaru's work "D for a @safer Linux Kernel" [1] 
>> has just been accepted for a poster presentation at APLAS [2]. 
>> We hope that this will be good publicity for D,
>>
>> Cheers,
>> RazvanN
>>
>> [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=weRSwbZtKu0
>> [2] 
>> https://conf.researchr.org/track/aplas-2019/aplas-2019-posters#About
>
> Nice. Has there been any recent performance improvements? There 
> was a similar talk recently at the Linux Security Summit [1] 
> yesterday from the Rust community.
>
> [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=RyY01fRyGhM

It seems that they are creating a framework for developing kernel 
modules in rust that can be integrated with the linux kernel. 
They haven't tested the performance of a particular rust driver 
compared to a C one. This is a bit different from what we did: we 
directly ported a C driver to D and integrated it with the 
kernel, with negligible performance loss. The 4% performance loss 
that was encountered in some situations is due to the fact that 
we have D wrappers over C function calls and some macros are 
translated as functions that are called at runtime - they are not 
inlined -; one thing we still need to do is to test with the 
recent link time optimizations (LTO) and profile guided 
optimizations (PGO) flags in clang; we are confident that this 
will enhance the performance of the ported driver).