On Tue, May 21, 2019 at 03:39:40PM +0100, Peter Maydell wrote:
> Hi; I have on my todo list the idea of some experimentation/prototyping
> of whether being able to write some components of QEMU in Rust would
> be (a) feasible (b) beneficial (c) fun to play around with even if
> it is likely that it doesn't go anywhere :-)
> 
> I know Paolo has had a look at how you might write some makefiles
> to integrate rust into a C program (https://github.com/bonzini/rust-and-c/).
> Has anybody else been doing anything in this general area ?
> 
> (I went to two good talks locally recently about rust-vmm and Amazon's
> 'firecracker' VMM by Andreea Florescu and Diana Popa -- I
> definitely plan to look at rust-vmm as part of this.)

There are some in-development vhost-user device backends in Rust.
Sergio Lopez is working on a vhost-user-blk implementation.  David
Gilbert is working on a vhost-user-fs implementation.

I think mixing Rust and C code in the main QEMU binary itself is
probably more trouble than it's worth.  Think boilerplate, duplication,
coming up with safe Rust APIs for QEMU's unsafe APIs.

I'm more interested in using Rust for separate processes that can be
written from scratch.

Stefan