Rust Confirmed for Linux Kernel: Experiment Concludes Successfully

The Rust experiment in the Linux kernel concludes, confirming its suitability and permanence in kernel development, with Rust now used in production and supported by major Linux distributions.

The Linux kernel community has formally concluded its Rust experiment, marking the end of Rust’s experimental status in kernel development. Rust support was first merged into the mainline kernel in version 6.1. The decision to close the experiment was made at the 2025 Linux Kernel Maintainers Summit and later reflected in a documentation update.

Rust code is already used in production environments, enabled by several major Linux distributions, and deployed at large scale, including on Android devices. While Rust is now an established part of the kernel, work continues to address limitations across different kernel configurations, architectures, and toolchains.

As part of the change, kernel documentation was updated to remove language describing Rust as experimental. The announcement also recognized the contributions of maintainers and developers who worked on Rust support since its initial merge.

The original text of the announcement as published originally in lore.kernel.org:

The Rust support was merged in v6.1 into mainline in order to help determine whether Rust as a language was suitable for the kernel, i.e. worth the tradeoffs, technically, procedurally and socially.

At the 2025 Linux Kernel Maintainers Summit, the experiment has just been deemed concluded. Thus remove the section -- it was not fully true already anyway, since there are already uses of Rust in production out there, some well-known Linux distributions enable it and it is already in millions of devices via Android.

Obviously, this does not mean that everything works for every kernel configuration, architecture, toolchain etc., or that there won't be new issues. There is still a ton of work to do in all areas, from the kernel to upstream Rust, GCC and other projects. And, in fact, certain combinations (such as the mixed GCC+LLVM builds and the upcoming GCC support) are still quite experimental but getting there.

But the experiment is done, i.e. Rust is here to stay. I hope this signals commitment from the kernel to companies and other entities to invest more into it, e.g. into giving time to their kernel developers to train themselves in Rust.

Thanks to the many kernel maintainers that gave the project their support and patience throughout these years, and to the many other developers, whether in the kernel or in other projects, that have made this possible. I had a long list of 173 names in the credits of the original pull that merged the support into the kernel , and now such a list would be way longer, so I will not even try to compose one, but again, thanks a lot, everybody.

• https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20251213000042.23072-...