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Four and a half years after Rust officially entered Linux 6.1, with real Apple GPU and NVMe drivers in production and several public conflicts between maintainers, it is time for a sober technical balance. What works, what still costs, and where the next phase is heading.
Rust entered the Linux kernel as an experiment in 2022. Three years on it has stable in-tree drivers, an increasingly polished internal API, and a first wave of contributors who treat the language as the default choice for new code.
Rust joined Linux mainline in version 6.1 (2022), and by 6.9 (2024) it already ships experimental drivers, including Asahi's GPU driver for Apple Silicon. In C/C++ projects like Chromium, around 70 percent of serious security bugs are memory-safety bugs, the real reason kernel maintainers are debating whether to adopt it.
Rust has been in the Linux kernel since version 6.1, though adoption is measured and deliberate. The Apple AGX GPU driver for Asahi Linux is the most prominent real upstream example. The goal is to eliminate an entire class of memory-safety bugs in new drivers without rewriting existing C code.
