John Seager, vice-president of Canonical for engineering and technical leader of the Ubuntu project, introduced an initiative to replace system utilities in Ubuntu with alternatives written in Rust. The primary objective of this initiative is to transition Ubuntu 25.10 to use the uutils toolkit by default instead of the GNU Coreutils set. If the experiment is deemed successful, uutils will also be utilized by default in the LTS branch of Ubuntu 26.04.
The replacement will affect over a hundred utilities included in Coreutils, such as sort, cat, chmod, chown, chroot, cp, date, dd, echo, hostname, id, ln, and ls. Currently, the uutils are already used by default in the Apertis distribution based on Debian, as well as in the independent AerynOS (SerpentOS) distribution. The recently released uutils coreutils package 0.0.30 successfully passes 507 tests (up from 506 in the previous release and 476 in the one before that) from the GNU Coreutils benchmark test suite. 69 tests failed, and 41 tests were skipped. In the coming weeks, work is also set to begin on replacing the utilities su and sudo in Ubuntu with the sudo-rs package. Additional projects under consideration include zlib-rs and ntpd-rs.
The reason for migration is stated as the desire to enhance the reliability and security of the utilities underlying the distribution. Using Rust will help reduce the risk of memory errors, such as accessing freed memory and buffer overflows. According to John Seager, protection against such errors will increase security guarantees, and with improved security, the overall reliability of the system will also increase.
It is noted that Canonical is exploring various methods to improve quality, one of which is the delivery of software originally developed with an emphasis on security, reliability, and correctness. For the basic components of the distribution, this is especially important, as problems in low-level software can impact the operation of all higher-level layers. For example, if there are performance issues in the core packages, it will affect the performance of other subsystems.
Voor het testen van vervangingen in Ubuntu-systemen is het project oxidizr voorbereid, dat een commandoregelhulpmiddel biedt voor het beheren van experimenten met het systeem die verband houden met het vervangen van traditionele hulpprogramma's door alternatieven die in Rust zijn geschreven. Momenteel zijn er in oxidizr experimenten beschikbaar om standaard over te schakelen naar het gebruik van de pakketten uutils coreutils, uutils findutils, uutils diffutils en sudo-rs. Bijvoorbeeld, om coreutils en findutils in uw systeem te vervangen, hoeft u alleen maar het commando "sudo oxidizr enable --experiments coreutils findutils" uit te voeren, en om naar de oorspronkelijke staat terug te keren, kunt u het commando "oxidizr disable" gebruiken.
Bron: opennet.ru
