'Rust makes coding fun again': Why Linux is moving away from C, according to Greg Kroah-Hartman

Linux stable kernel maintainer Greg Kroah‑Hartman: "The Rust experiment is over. It's real."

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At Open Source Summit India 2026 in Mumbai, Linux stable kernel maintainer Greg Kroah‑Hartman said in his keynote that "the [Linux] kernel is moving toward Rust . Git is moving toward Rust. Lots of projects are starting to move toward Rust."

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He didn't always feel that way. Kroah-Hartman added, "A number of years ago, when a friend of mine said, 'Ah, you got to try this new language. It's called Rust.' I was like, 'What? No, C is great.' His friend continued, "'No, no, no! It makes programming fun again.' I'm like, 'Nah, programming is fun in C.' He was right. I should have done it then. Rust is actually fun. It makes programming fun. It takes a lot of stuff away from having to worry about the compiler, which can fix a lot of your problems for you, and it makes code a little bit better."

So, Kroah-Hartman has moved from being a Rust skeptic to one of its strongest champions inside the kernel. He now regards Rust as a permanent part of Linux, not an experiment. His case is straightforward: Rust's ownership and type system can eliminate most of the "stupid little tiny things" that dominate kernel Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs), while making life easier for overworked maintainers. "Rust," in short, "makes my life so much easier."

Kroah-Hartman should know. He oversees the Linux kernel CVE process , and he has a unique vantage point as the stable‑kernel maintainer. In India, he said Linux sees "about 13 CVEs a day" and has been running at "almost nine changes an hour" for a decade or more. Most of those vulnerabilities, he argued, are not exotic attacks but simple C mistakes -- unchecked pointers, forgotten unlocks, and sloppy cleanup paths: "This is what we're fixing 13 times a day. Small, trivial, little bugs like this all the time."

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How can Rust help with this issue? Easy. Kroah-Hartman continued: "Here is my statement, totally unscientific. I've seen every CVE the kernel has done in the past 25 years. I think 80% would be gone, just because they would be caught by Rust." The remaining 20% are the logic bugs he'd prefer to focus on: "Rust will still crash just fine. You can do really foolish things in Rust, but all the tiny, stupid, trivial things Rust will handle for us."

Kroah‑Hartman consistently framed language choices in terms of reviewer workload rather than developer convenience. Linux has "over 5,000 developers" but "about 150 core maintainers that review the majority of the code," a skew that drives his priorities. "We optimize for reviewers. We don't optimize for developers because we have a lot of developers," he said, suggesting Rust's ability to enforce locking and lifetime rules at build time means reviewers can spend their limited bandwidth on logic rather than bookkeeping: "If it builds as a reviewer, I know it's OK. I can look at the logic."