Rust in Linux's Kernel 'is No Longer Experimental' (thenewstack.io)
(Saturday December 13, 2025 @11:34AM (EditorDavid)
from the Rust-never-sleeps dept.)
- Reference: 0180374211
- News link: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/25/12/13/0347245/rust-in-linuxs-kernel-is-no-longer-experimental
- Source link: https://thenewstack.io/rust-goes-mainstream-in-the-linux-kernel/
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols [1]files this report from Tokyo :
> At the invitation-only [2]Linux Kernel Maintainers Summit here, the top Linux maintainers decided, as Jonathan Corbet, Linux kernel developer, put it, "The consensus among the assembled developers is that [3]Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental — it is now a core part of the kernel and is here to stay. So the 'experimental' tag will be coming off." As Linux kernel maintainer Steven Rosted told me, "There was zero pushback."
>
> This has been a long time coming. This shift caps five years of sometimes-fierce debate over whether the memory-safe language belonged alongside C at the heart of the world's most widely deployed open source operating system... It all began when Alex Gaynor and [4]Geoffrey Thomas at the 2019 Linux Security Summit said that about two-thirds of Linux kernel vulnerabilities come from memory safety issues. Rust, in theory, could avoid these by using [5]Rust's inherently safer application programming interfaces (API) ... In those early days, the plan was not to rewrite Linux in Rust; it still isn't, but to adopt it selectively where it can provide the most security benefit without destabilizing mature C code. In short, new drivers, subsystems, and helper libraries would be the first targets...
>
> Despite the fuss, more and more programs were ported to Rust. By April 2025, the Linux kernel contained about 34 million lines of C code, with only 25 thousand lines written in Rust. At the same time, more and more drivers and higher-level utilities were being written in Rust. For instance, the Debian Linux distro developers announced that going forward, [6]Rust would be a required dependency in its foundational Advanced Package Tool (APT) .
>
> This change doesn't mean everyone will need to use Rust. C is not going anywhere. Still, as several maintainers told me, they expect to see many more drivers being written in Rust. In particular, Rust looks especially attractive for "leaf" drivers (network, storage, NVMe, etc.), where the [7]Rust-for-Linux bindings expose safe wrappers over kernel C APIs . Nevertheless, for would-be kernel and systems programmers, Rust's new status in Linux hints at a career path that blends deep understanding of C with fluency in Rust's safety guarantees. This combination may define the next generation of low-level development work.
[1] https://thenewstack.io/rust-goes-mainstream-in-the-linux-kernel/
[2] https://events.linuxfoundation.org/linux-kernel-maintainer-summit/
[3] https://lwn.net/Articles/1049831/
[4] https://ldpreload.com/
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyY01fRyGhM
[6] https://lists.debian.org/deity/2025/10/msg00071.html
[7] https://mars-research.github.io/doc/2024-acsac-rfl.pdf
> At the invitation-only [2]Linux Kernel Maintainers Summit here, the top Linux maintainers decided, as Jonathan Corbet, Linux kernel developer, put it, "The consensus among the assembled developers is that [3]Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental — it is now a core part of the kernel and is here to stay. So the 'experimental' tag will be coming off." As Linux kernel maintainer Steven Rosted told me, "There was zero pushback."
>
> This has been a long time coming. This shift caps five years of sometimes-fierce debate over whether the memory-safe language belonged alongside C at the heart of the world's most widely deployed open source operating system... It all began when Alex Gaynor and [4]Geoffrey Thomas at the 2019 Linux Security Summit said that about two-thirds of Linux kernel vulnerabilities come from memory safety issues. Rust, in theory, could avoid these by using [5]Rust's inherently safer application programming interfaces (API) ... In those early days, the plan was not to rewrite Linux in Rust; it still isn't, but to adopt it selectively where it can provide the most security benefit without destabilizing mature C code. In short, new drivers, subsystems, and helper libraries would be the first targets...
>
> Despite the fuss, more and more programs were ported to Rust. By April 2025, the Linux kernel contained about 34 million lines of C code, with only 25 thousand lines written in Rust. At the same time, more and more drivers and higher-level utilities were being written in Rust. For instance, the Debian Linux distro developers announced that going forward, [6]Rust would be a required dependency in its foundational Advanced Package Tool (APT) .
>
> This change doesn't mean everyone will need to use Rust. C is not going anywhere. Still, as several maintainers told me, they expect to see many more drivers being written in Rust. In particular, Rust looks especially attractive for "leaf" drivers (network, storage, NVMe, etc.), where the [7]Rust-for-Linux bindings expose safe wrappers over kernel C APIs . Nevertheless, for would-be kernel and systems programmers, Rust's new status in Linux hints at a career path that blends deep understanding of C with fluency in Rust's safety guarantees. This combination may define the next generation of low-level development work.
[1] https://thenewstack.io/rust-goes-mainstream-in-the-linux-kernel/
[2] https://events.linuxfoundation.org/linux-kernel-maintainer-summit/
[3] https://lwn.net/Articles/1049831/
[4] https://ldpreload.com/
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyY01fRyGhM
[6] https://lists.debian.org/deity/2025/10/msg00071.html
[7] https://mars-research.github.io/doc/2024-acsac-rfl.pdf
I have to say by now I approve (Score:2)
While the Rust community is certainly toxic in parts, the language has one really big advantage: It is hard to learn!
My take is this does more for security and reliability than all the security features it has, because it keeps the clueless coders (which is the majority) out of it.
Now please fix the one glaring defect Rust has: No spec. And no, do not tell me "the implementation is the spec". That is amateur-hour nonsense.
Re: (Score:3)
Sure that will keep the sort of monkeys that cobble together JavaScript snippets taken from Stack Overflow posts away, but C was already a hard enough language for them to learn so they were already kept away. The language itself still can't prevent people from doing stupid things or ensure that they follow best practices as the recent [1]CloudFlare outage showed. [substack.com]
It may be slightly worse because there's nothing quite so dangerous as someone who believes they're not in any danger because they've got some kin
[1] https://lucisqr.substack.com/p/the-cloudflare-outage-and-the-rust
Re: (Score:2)
> Rust (or any tool for that matter) is of no benefit if it makes the people using it more complacent towards the problems it can't prevent.
I agree on that. But I do not think the tool choice plays a role in whether people take something seriously or not. Some people do understand risk and risk management, but most simply do not and nothing will change that. The benefit of Rust is that it is likely quite a bit harder to learn that C and that selects the people for those that actually want to do this right and are willing to invest significant effort and bring significant talent to the table. And that may make a significant difference. In any ca