Big one for the plumbing under almost every Linux distro, Arch and Omarchy included. Phoronix reports that systemd Git now lets systemd programs be written in Rust as an alternative to C.
What landed
- It’s for systemd’s programs and leaf components only. The core systemd library doesn’t support Rust yet, because some blockers have to be solved first.
- It’s Rust without Cargo: everything builds with Meson, and only C linkage is allowed.
- The first Rust component will be
systemd-keyring-setup, which enrolls X.509 certificates into the kernel’s dm-verity, fs-verity and BPF keyrings at boot. It isn’t merged yet but is expected soon. - There’s no plan to port existing C code to Rust.
- Rust binaries come out a bit bigger: a test program was 32KB versus 20KB for its C twin.
- It’s optional for now, via the
-Drust=Meson option (auto by default), and it’s headed for what will become systemd 263.
My take
This is a careful, sane way to do it. New stuff can be in Rust, nobody’s rewriting what works, and no Cargo dependency sprawl gets dragged into PID 1. Memory safety in new boot-time security code is a win. Expect plenty of forum arguments anyway.
Have a blessed day! And Happy Hacking!
