I Ubuntu 25.10 har man beslutat att ersätta GNU Coreutils med uutils, skrivna i Rust

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 alternatives written in Rust. The first goal of the initiative is to transition Ubuntu 25.10 to use the uutils toolkit as the default instead of the GNU Coreutils set. If the experiment is deemed successful, uutils will also be used by 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, the uutils utilities are being used by default in the Apertis distribution based on Debian, as well as in the independent distribution AerynOS (SerpentOS). The recently released uutils coreutils package 0.0.30 has successfully passed 507 tests (up from 506 in the previous release and 476 in the release before that) from the reference test suite of GNU Coreutils. 69 tests failed, and 41 tests were skipped. In the coming weeks, work is also planned to replace the su and sudo utilities in Ubuntu with the sudo-rs package. Additional mentioned projects include zlib-rs and ntpd-rs.

The reason for the migration is the desire to enhance the reliability and security of the utilities underlying the distribution. The use of Rust will reduce the risk of memory errors, such as accessing memory after it has been freed and going out of buffer bounds. According to Jon Seager, protection against such errors will increase security guarantees, and with increased security, the overall reliability of the system will also improve.

It is noted that Canonical is exploring various methods to enhance quality, one of which is delivering software that is initially developed with a focus on security, reliability, and correctness. This is especially important for the core components of the distribution because if problems arise in low-level software, these issues affect the operation of all higher layers; for instance, if there are performance problems in the core packages, this impacts the performance of other subsystems.

För att testa ersättning av systemkomponenter i Ubuntu har projektet oxidizr förberetts, vilket erbjuder ett kommandoradsverktyg för att hantera experiment med systemet relaterat till att byta ut traditionella verktyg mot alternativ skrivna i Rust. För närvarande möjliggör oxidizr experiment för standardövergången till användning av paketen uutils coreutils, uutils findutils, uutils diffutils och sudo-rs. Till exempel, för att ersätta coreutils och findutils i ditt system räcker det att köra kommandot 'sudo oxidizr enable —experiments coreutils findutils', och för att återgå till ursprungligt tillstånd kan du använda kommandot 'oxidizr disable'.

Källa: opennet.ru