Linux has released Linux 6.1, which became available a few weeks ago.

Prior to its official release, Rust support was available in linux-next, a git tree resulting from the merging of all the developer and maintainer git trees, for over a year. With the stable release, Rust became the second language officially adopted for Linux kernel development, alongside C.

Initial Rust support is just the bare minimum to get Rust code building in the kernel, say the Rust for Linux maintainers. This likely means that Rust support is not yet ready for production development, and that a number of infrastructure-level changes should be expected in future releases. However, there is a lot of work being done on several current drivers that should become available in the near future. These include a Rust nvme driver, a 9p server, and drivers for Apple Silicon GPUs.

Rust for Linux is only available [on the architectures supported by, which is required to compile Rust, therefore LLVM/Clang should be used to build the entire Linux kernel instead of the more traditional GNU toolchain.

In addition to bindings, Rust for Linux uses abstractions, which are Rust wrappers built around the C code available in the kernel. The purpose of abstractions is to allow developers to write drivers for Rust without having direct access to the C bindings, but they are currently only available for a limited number of kernel APIs. However, the number will grow as Rust is further developed for Linux, maintainers say.