Jon Seager, a Canonical vice president of engineering and technical leader of the Ubuntu project, introduced an initiative to replace system utilities in Ubuntu with equivalents written in Rust. The first goal of the initiative is to transition Ubuntu 25.10 to use the uutils toolkit by default instead of the GNU Coreutils utility set. If the experiment is deemed successful, uutils will also be default in the LTS branch of Ubuntu 26.04.
The replacement will affect more than a hundred utilities included in Coreutils, such as sort, cat, chmod, chown, chroot, cp, date, dd, echo, hostname, id, ln, and ls. Currently, uutils are already used by default in the Debian-based distribution Apertis and in the independent AerynOS (SerpentOS) distribution. The released uutils coreutils package version 0.0.30 successfully passes 507 tests (up from 506 in the last release and 476 before that) from the standard test suite of GNU Coreutils. 69 tests failed, and 41 tests were skipped. In the coming weeks, work is also planned to start on replacing the su and sudo utilities in Ubuntu with the sudo-rs package. Also mentioned among the projects under consideration are zlib-rs and ntpd-rs.
The reason for the migration is the desire to enhance the reliability and security of the utilities underpinning the distribution. Using Rust will reduce the risk of errors related to memory management, such as accessing memory after it has been freed and buffer overflows. According to Jon Seager, protections against such errors will increase security guarantees, and with enhanced security, the overall system reliability will also improve.
It is noted that Canonical is exploring various methods to improve quality, one of which is providing software that is originally developed with a focus on security, reliability, and correctness. This is particularly crucial for the basic components of the distribution, as issues in low-level software can impact the functioning of all higher layers; for instance, if there are performance issues in the base packages, those will also affect the performance of other subsystems.
Az oxidizr nevű projekt készített egy eszközkészletet a parancssoros rendszer komponensek kicseréléséhez az Ubuntu rendszerben, amely lehetővé teszi a hagyományos segédprogramok alternatívákkal való helyettesítését Rust nyelven írt segédprogramokkal. Jelenleg az oxidizr keretén belül elérhető kísérletek lehetővé teszik a uutils coreutils, uutils findutils, uutils diffutils és sudo-rs csomagokra való alapértelmezett váltást. Például a coreutils és findutils rendszerszintű cseréjéhez elegendő kiadni a „sudo oxidizr enable —experiments coreutils findutils” parancsot, míg a visszaállításhoz a „oxidizr disable” parancs használható.
Forrás: opennet.ru
