Linus Torvalds merged the "char/misc" changes for the Linux 7.4 kernel driver on Saturday. Most notable this cycle for char/misc is what's being removed: Google's C-written Binder driver has left the kernel with the Rust-based modern Binder driver ready to take for the role of being used by all future Android devices.

As noted back in September when the patch was floated, the "painful to maintainer" C implementation of the Binder IPC driver is being retired with the Rust Binder driver having matured quite well. The C driver grew complex over Android's history and difficult to maintain. The Rust Binder driver as the earliest prominent Rust kernel driver has exceeded feature parity to the original driver and also outperforming the C driver in some tests.

The Rust Binder driver will now be Google's sole focus moving forward for this inter-process communication used on Android. Greg Kroah-Hartman remarked in the char/misc pull request:

"removal of the C binder code, the rust version is stable and will be used going forward in a few billion devices. Great job by those developers."

The char/misc pull also includes lots of IIO driver updates and a variety of other small fixes across different drivers.