Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils

Ubuntu 26.10 completes the distro’s move to Rust-based halfway utilities, pinch the commands antecedently held backmost owed to information issues now migrated to memory-safe versions.

cp, mv and rm were held backmost on their GNU versions in Ubuntu 26.04 LTS owed to a harvest of TOCTOU (time-of-check to time-of-use) issues that needed to beryllium fixed successful the uutils versions. 

With those issues resolved upstream, Ubuntu 26.10 finishes the job. The ‘Stonking Stingray’ ships a afloat group of Rust halfway utilities, which encompasses communal command-line devices for illustration ls, cat, chmod and  du.

Canonical’s engineers began ‘oxidising’ the distro – replacing foundational package pinch Rust alternatives – successful 2025. It sees information benefits successful doing so, since Rust catches representation bugs astatine compile time, whereas C compilers don’t.

Ubuntu 25.10 was the first merchandise to vessel pinch Rust-based utilities and made Rust-based sudo the default.

Migrating hasn’t been without hiccups, but Canonical has been studious.

It commissioned a information audit of uutils up of 26.04, which recovered the issues that kept the 3 commands backmost connected their GNU versions. It’s besides a golden sponsor of the Trifecta Tech Foundation, giving €40,000 a twelvemonth to money its activity connected Rust software.

The non-profit instauration is undertaking a Rust-based rewrite of the Network Time Protocol (NTP), and Ubuntu plans to usage it arsenic the default clip sync customer by 27.10.

Here, the completion of the coreutils migration offers nary functional quality to extremity users. The Rust-based uutils intends for drop-in compatibility pinch GNU versions, and treats immoderate deviances arsenic a bug. That’s by designed; the constituent is 1 of improved security.

Ubuntu 26.10 ‘Stonking Stingray’ beta arrives later this month, earlier the unchangeable merchandise connected 15 October, 2026.