IBM s390 Is The Latest Architecture Seeing Rust Linux Kernel Support

An IBM engineer posted the first set of patches enabling the Rust programming language support for the Linux kernel to be built on the s390 architecture.

Following x86_64, ARM, ARM64, LoongArch and RISC-V, IBM s390 is slated to be the next CPU architecture seeing Rust support within the Linux kernel.

IBM engineer Jan Polensky explained with the patch series:

"Rust support on s390 requires a small set of architecture-specific pieces before the generic Rust kernel infrastructure can be used.

The series wires up s390 as a Rust-capable 64-bit architecture, adds the missing assembly interfaces needed by Rust for WARN/BUG reporting and for static branches, and adjusts bindgen parameters to avoid repr layout conflicts caused by packed and aligned s390 structures.

s390 currently requires a nightly rustc due to -Zpacked-stack, and the minimum tool version gating is adjusted accordingly."

This patch series just affecting a few dozen lines of code across four patches is all that's needed for getting the Rust programming language support in the Linux kernel up and running for IBM Z / s390.

The patches are currently under review and given the small amount of code churn we'll see if this gets picked up time for next month's Linux v7.2 kernel cycle.