EN:The Journey of Rust and Procps

Hi, I'm Krysztal Huang, a contributor to Debian's uutils/procps.

I'm thrilled to have had the opportunity to participate in GSoC 2024, contributing to the uutils project and gaining a wealth of knowledge and skills along the way. :)

The Debian and uutils communities are incredibly welcoming, which has been fantastic. I've been using Debian as my primary operating system for about eight years now, drawn to its stability. I frequently rely on Debian for my personal services and various projects.

The procps project

The most widely used implementation of procps is the one under GPLv3, the procps-ng project. It provides a set of tools for system information statistics that have been used for many years and have served well. However, it is written in C and licensed under GPLv3.

This project has been in use for over thirty years, and its code is not as open as it could be because of its license. Moreover, it will likely remain in our operating systems for the foreseeable future.

But procps and C are getting old. Younger developers tend to prefer newer programming languages like Rust. As a result, procps may rely on the previous generation for maintenance, while the younger generation may have less interest in it due to their unfamiliarity with C. Consequently, those wanting to contribute may struggle to effectively fix issues.

The CVEs and Rust

Rust offers excellent memory safety and performance. Many CVEs associated with the original procps are related to memory safety issues (e.g., buffer overflows):

...and others.

However, with Rust, these issues are caught at compile time, thanks to its ownership system.

So...?

I'm working on rewriting procps under the uutils organization. The new implementation, simply called procps, has taught me a lot: from understanding the /proc pseudo-filesystem to the differences between *NIX (and *NIX-like) systems.

The initial implementation of uutils procps was focused on the Linux platform. However, to support the broader *NIX platform, including macOS and FreeBSD, it's important to address the subtle differences in implementation across these operating systems. As of now, the uutils procps does not support macOS and FreeBSD.

Relevant issues:

The ultimate goal for uutils procps is to support both *NIX and Windows platforms. However, the threading models for Windows and *NIX platforms differ significantly, necessitating the abstraction of these models into a more general one.

Most importantly, uutils' procps implementation is licensed using the MIT license, which is a very loose open source license. Meaning that uutils' procps has virtually no restrictions from source distribution to use.