Based on stories like these, I get the feeling there’s active hostility from the maintainers against Rust contributors. While the kernel in general has accepted Rust contributions, the maintainers of individual subsystems seem to disagree.
I don’t think the language matters. The problem is cultural, first and foremost. Had a new wave of programmers used C to expand the Linux kernel, they probably would’ve run into the same issues.
This isn’t the first time I’ve heard devs complain about the DRM API, and most of my kernel panics seem to involve DRM as well (mostly Nvidia, but the Intel driver crashes too). Maybe it’s because of performance reasons, but DRM seems very hard to get right, even for already merged in-tree drivers.
If the problem does turn out to be technical in nature, maybe Linux needs to ask Microsoft for help. They don’t seem to have that many issues rewriting system components into Rust, and they have the additional challenge of remaining binary compatible with the C(++) code that came before it.