Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils
Ubuntu 26.10 has completed its transition to Rust-based core utilities, replacing traditional C-based tools to improve memory safety. This move aims to eliminate security vulnerabilities like TOCTOU issues while maintaining drop-in compatibility for users.
Why it matters
This represents a significant shift in systems programming, prioritizing memory-safe languages in foundational operating system components.
Ubuntu 26.10 completes the distro’s move to Rust-based core utilities, with the commands previously held back due to security issues now migrated to memory-safe versions.
cp , mv and rm were held back on their GNU versions in Ubuntu 26.04 LTS due to a crop of TOCTOU (time-of-check to time-of-use) issues that needed to be fixed in the uutils versions.
With those issues resolved upstream, Ubuntu 26.10 finishes the job. The ‘Stonking Stingray’ ships a full set of Rust core utilities, which encompasses common command-line tools like ls , cat , chmod and du .
Canonical donates €40k a year to help fund work on Rust software
Canonical’s engineers began ‘oxidising’ the distro – replacing foundational software with Rust alternatives – in 2025. It sees security benefits in doing so, since Rust catches memory bugs at compile time, whereas C compilers don’t.
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