Jon Seager, vice president of Canonical for engineering and technical leader of the Ubuntu project, presented an initiative to replace system utilities in Ubuntu with analogs written in Rust. The first goal of the initiative is to switch Ubuntu 25.10 to use the uutils toolkit by default instead of the GNU Coreutils collection. If the experiment is deemed successful, uutils will also be deployed by default in the Ubuntu 26.04 LTS branch.
The replacement will affect more than a hundred utilities included in Coreutils, including sort, cat, chmod, chown, chroot, cp, date, dd, echo, hostname, id, ln, and ls. Currently, uutils utilities are already being used by default in the Apertis distribution based on Debian, as well as in the independent distribution AerynOS (SerpentOS). Last week's release of the uutils coreutils package 0.0.30 successfully passed 507 tests (up from 506 in the previous release, and 476 in the one before that) from the benchmark test suite of GNU Coreutils. 69 tests failed, and 41 tests were skipped. In the coming weeks, work is also planned to begin on replacing the su and sudo utilities in Ubuntu with the sudo-rs package. The projects of zlib-rs and ntpd-rs are also mentioned.
The reason for the migration is said to be the desire to increase the reliability and security of the utilities underpinning the distribution. Using Rust will help reduce the risk of memory-related errors, such as accessing memory after it has been freed and buffer overflows. According to Jon Seager, protection against such errors will improve security guarantees, and with increased security, the overall reliability of the system will also improve.
It is noted that Canonical is considering various methods to enhance quality, one of which is delivering software originally developed with a focus on security, reliability, and correctness. This is especially important for the basic components of the distribution, as problems in low-level software can affect the performance of all higher layers. For example, if there are performance issues in core packages, they also impact the performance of other subsystems.
For testing the replacement of system components in Ubuntu, the project oxidizr has been prepared, offering a command-line toolkit for managing system experiments related to replacing traditional utilities with alternatives written in Rust. Currently, oxidizr provides experiments for default transition to using the uutils coreutils, uutils findutils, uutils diffutils, and sudo-rs packages. For example, to replace coreutils and findutils in your system, simply run the command "sudo oxidizr enable —experiments coreutils findutils", and to revert to the original state, you can use the command "oxidizr disable".
Kilde: opennet.ru
