Episode Details

Hot off the press: this episode is a live recording from Rust Week in Utrecht, just two days ago. On stage with me are two people who hardly need an introduction in the Linux world: Greg Kroah-Hartman, Linux Foundation Fellow, stable kernel maintainer and an ambassador for the kernel, and Alice Ryhl, core maintainer of Tokio and one of the driving forces behind Rust for Linux at Google.

I have to admit a bit of personal history here: I first wrote about Greg more than 20 years ago for the German online newspaper Pro-Linux. Getting to sit down with him, and with Alice, in front of a live audience to talk about how Rust is reshaping the most important piece of infrastructure on the planet, was a genuine career highlight.

We get into the big questions: Why does Alice believe that interop, not rewrites, is how Rust wins inside Linux? How do you carefully weave in Rust while maintaining a 35-million-line C codebase? And what does it actually feel like, day to day, to write kernel code in Rust?

Rust for Linux is the project bringing the Rust programming language into the Linux kernel. After years of patches, proposals, and heated mailing list threads, Rust is now an officially supported language inside the kernel tree, no longer an experiment. The work spans everything from the build system and the kernel crate to drivers, abstractions over core subsystems and brand-new pieces of infrastructure written entirely in Rust.

Greg Kroah-Hartman is a Linux Foundation Fellow, the maintainer of the stable Linux kernel branch, and the maintainer of, among many other things, the USB subsystem, the driver core, sysfs, debugfs, kobject, TTY layer and staging tree. He has been a central figure in Linux for over two decades, has written several books about kernel development, and is convinced Rust belongs in the kernel.

Alice Ryhl is a software engineer at Google working on Android and Rust for Linux, and a core maintainer of Tokio, the asynchronous runtime that over 50% of all crates on crates.io directly depends on. Inside the kernel she works on Binder, on async abstractions, and on the bindings that allow Rust drivers to talk safely to the rest of the kernel.

Rust Week is an annual conference organized by RustNL. The 2026 edition took place in Utrecht, the Netherlands, from May 18 to May 23. It features talks, workshops, the Rust All Hands, and expert sessions on a wide variety of topics revolving around Rust. This episode was recorded live on stage during the conference. Thanks to the Rust Week team who made this recording possible! Learn more about Rust Week on their website.