Rust Adoption at Scale With Ubuntu
Talkat RustConf 2026 · on Wednesday, 2026-09-09· at 09:15· Room 511 | Palais des Congrès de Montréal, Palais des Congrès de Montréal·
summary
Ubuntu ships Rust rewrites of critical utilities: sudo-rs replaces sudo in a single release cycle, uutils coreutils covers 70+ GNU utilities with three fallbacks left after 26.04 LTS, and NTPd-rs will become default by the next staged release. UPKI integrates revocation checks into OpenSSL and curl using CRLite to fetch millions of revocations efficiently. Rust hiring grows a toolchain team from one proposed member to ten, and a funded PhD pairs LLMs with formal methods to verify C→Rust translations.
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chapters (16)
- 0:00Introduction to Rust at Ubuntu
- 1:09Ubuntu LTS with Rust utilities
- 2:12Replacing sudo with sudo-rs
- 3:35NTPd-rs for time syncing
- 4:40Coreutils Rust transition
- 6:28UPKI for certificate revocation
- 8:56Sponsoring Rust projects and research
- 10:41C to Rust automated translation
- 12:05Why Canonical embraces Rust
- 13:52Usability and UX improvements
- 14:55Resilience and security benefits
- 16:40Documentation and tooling for Rust
- 18:05Minimal Rust base containers
- 19:08Distributing Rust apps via Snap
- 20:55Future Rust projects at Ubuntu
- 22:43Q&A and closing remarks
