Use of the Rust programming language in the Linux kernel is no longer experimental, following a decision at the 2025 Kernel Maintainer Summit in Tokyo, Japan last week.
A post from Miguel Ojeda, who leads the Rust for Linux project, confirmed that after a period of experimentation to determine whether the technical, procedural and social trade-offs of supporting Rust as a language for kernel development were worth it, “the experiment is done, i.e. Rust is here to stay.”
Ojeda said “this does not mean that everything works for every kernel configuration, architecture, toolchain etc” and he warned a lot of work remains. He noted though that Android 16 devices based on the 6.12 Linux kernel ship with ashmem (anonymous shared memory subsystem) memory allocator, built with Rust, which means that millions of devices already use Rust for Linux in production.
A key project is gccrs, an implementation of Rust on top of the GCC (GNU compiler collection), which is not yet complete. LWN’s Jonathan Corbet reported that “the gccrs developers see building the kernel as one of their top priorities; Ojeda said to expect some interesting news from that project next year.”
The plan, according to Corbet’s report, is that it will always be possible to build the kernel with the version of Rust included in the latest Debian stable release. The Debian project has said that Rust will have “hard Rust requirements” in its APT (advanced package tool) package manager from May 2026. Corbet also reports that Dave Airlie, maintainer for DRM (Direct Rendering Manager), a Linux subsystem which is part of the graphics stack, said at the summit that the DRM project was about a year away from requiring Rust and disallowing C for new drivers.
Linux maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman said during the discussion that drivers in Rust were proving safer than those written in C, a good endorsement for the use of Rust since memory safety is the key reason to support it. Issues with interaction between Rust code and the core kernel written in C had been fewer than expected, Kroah-Hartman said.
There are some downsides to requiring Rust support, particularly for chip architectures that have low usage, such as IBM s390 systems. Another concern is that a formal specification for Rust remains work in progress.
Linux adoption is a boost for Rust, and Ojeda expressed the hope that “companies and other entities” will invest in it by “giving time to their kernel developers to train themselves in Rust.”
In the 2024 State of Rust survey, the top developer concern for the future was “not enough usage in the tech industry.” 2025 has been a good year for Rust and those concerns now look less pressing.