This Month in Rust OSDev: February 2026

Published on Mar 11, 2026 (edited by @phil-opp)

Welcome to a new issue of "This Month in Rust OSDev". In these posts, we give a regular overview of notable changes in the Rust operating system development ecosystem.

This series is openly developed on GitHub. Feel free to open pull requests there with content you would like to see in the next issue. If you find some issues on this page, please report them by creating an issue or using our comment form at the bottom of this page.

Announcements, News, and Blog Posts

Here we collect news, blog posts, etc. related to OS development in Rust.

Linux 7.0 Officially Concluding The Rust Experiment
- Rust is now formally accepted as a permanent part of the Linux kernel, shipping in production across multiple distributions and millions of Android devices.
The future for Tyr
- Progress on Tyr, a Rust GPU driver for Arm Mali hardware. The DRM subsystem is reportedly "about a year away" from requiring new drivers to be written in Rust.
Microsoft LiteBox
- A Rust library OS supporting kernel- and user-mode execution, with sandboxing for running unmodified Linux programs on Windows and SEV SNP.
This Month in Redox - January 2026
- Redox got Cargo and rustc compiling natively and made progress on capability-based security.
CHERIoT Rust: Status update #0
- Six months of progress porting Rust to the CHERIoT capability-based hardware architecture. Core and alloc now compile for the new riscv32cheriot-unknown-cheriotrtos target.
Ariel OS v0.3.0: BLE, Sensors, UART, and More!
- New release adds BLE support, hardware-agnostic UART drivers, sensor abstraction, and expanded MCU support (ESP32, STM32, Nordic, RP).
Async/await on the GPU
- Rust's Future trait and async/await running on GPU hardware, reusing the Embassy embedded executor.

Infrastructure and Tooling

In this section, we collect recent updates to rustc, cargo, and other tooling that are relevant to Rust OS development.

RFC: Unsafe fields
- Approved for implementation. Allows marking struct fields as unsafe when they maintain safety invariants.
Add try_shrink_to and try_shrink_to_fit to Vec
- Fallible shrinking methods that return TryReserveError instead of panicking on OOM.
Stabilize ptr_as_ref_unchecked
- Raw-pointer-to-reference conversion without null/alignment checks.
Stabilize atomic_try_update and deprecate fetch_update
- Cleaner API for lock-free atomic compare-and-swap loops. fetch_update will be deprecated starting in Rust 1.99.0.
Add avr_target_feature
- Unstable target features for AVR microcontrollers including tinyencoding, lowbytefirst, and various instruction features.
Stabilize cfg_select!
- Builtin macro for selecting code based on cfg predicates, simplifying conditional compilation.
Stabilize core::hint::cold_path
- Mark unlikely code paths to help the compiler optimize branch layout.

`rust-osdev` Projects

In this section, we give an overview of notable changes to the projects hosted under the rust-osdev organization.

`uefi-rs`

Maintained by @GabrielMajeri, @nicholasbishop, and @phip1611

uefi makes it easy to develop Rust software that leverages safe, convenient, and performant abstractions for UEFI functionality.

We merged the following PRs this month:

Thanks to @seijikun for their contributions!

`bootloader`

Maintained by @phil-opp and @Freax13

The bootloader crate implements a custom Rust-based bootloader for easy loading of 64-bit ELF executables. This month, we merged the following changes:

Thanks to @Freax13 and @Wasabi375 for their contributions!

`virtio-spec-rs`

Maintained by @mkroening

The virtio-spec crate provides definitions from the Virtual I/O Device (VIRTIO) specification. This project aims to be unopinionated regarding actual VIRTIO drivers that are implemented on top of this crate.

We merged the following PRs this month:

`bootimage`

Maintained by @phil-opp

The bootimage tool allows the creation of bootable disk images for bootloader-based kernels. It also provides a runner executable for cargo to make cargo run and cargo test work using QEMU.