The Year Linux Went “Rusty”: 2025’s Most Audacious Kernel Breakthroughs

The year saw Rust firmly establish itself in the Linux kernel, with the Rust-for-Linux project reaching a formal milestone as Rust became a fully fledged part of Linux and a patch by Miguel Ojeda closing the experimental chapter. According to CVE-WATCHTOWER, Rust code in the kernel received its first CVE vulnerability, marking a notable adulthood milestone for the project.

The article notes ongoing maturation, including Greg Kroah-Hartman advocating for new drivers written in Rust and Linus Torvalds signalling openness to Rust code even amid maintainer objections. Meta was reported to be running a task scheduler originally developed for Valve’s Steam Deck on its servers, a surprising cross-application success in hyperscale environments.

Red Hat engineers introduced a new Rust-based driver for NVIDIA GPUs, named NOVA, intended as the successor to Nouveau and supporting GPUs from the RTX 20 (Turing) series, with development continuing in kernel 6.17 alongside other Rust-driven innovations.