Using Rust in the binder driver
summary
A Rust reimplementation of the binder driver reaches feature parity with the C driver, boots a device, passes the test suite, and matches microbenchmark throughput after targeted optimizations. Unsafe is limited mainly to C interop and binderfs, and Rust prevents memory-safety bugs that C allowed so a reported logic bug produced no use-after-free though it remained exploitable. Code size is roughly equal overall with more deletions than additions, and some tiny refcount functions were rewritten for inlining to recover performance.
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chapters (11)
- 0:00Introduction to binder
- 3:33Problems with C binder
- 7:07Rust implementation benefits
- 10:57Rust binder performance
- 14:13Unsafe code in Rust binder
- 16:20Vulnerability comparison
- 18:55Optimization learnings
- 20:23Community contributions
- 21:53API changes and maintenance
- 23:40Maintainer collaboration
- 26:10Future of Rust in kernel
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