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Pinning: Values That Must Never Move

Moving a value in Rust normally just copies its bits to a new address, which is harmless — unless something inside it, or something elsewhere, remembers its old address. Pinning is the promise that a value will stay where it was first placed, so those remembered addresses stay true. It matters for any structure that links itself into a list the rest of the system walks.

Questions this Concept answers

Why do so many kernel structures need to be pinned?

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Self-Referential Structs and Pin in Rust

A self-referential struct is a data structure containing a field that holds a reference into another field of the same struct instance; this is fundamentally incompatible with Rust's ownership model …