GNU Coreutils soon to be replaced? Rust Coreutils 0.1 increase compatibility

The Rust Coreutils have been released in version 0.1. This is an open-source reimplementation of the GNU Core Utilities, which are mainly written in C. They contain over 100 classic Unix command line programs, including ls, cp and rm, and are intended to be fully compatible with GNU applications in the future. With the update, almost 85 percent of the Rust core utilities pass the compatibility test. There are also performance improvements and SELinux integration.

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Rust coreutils come closer to GNU original

After the version jump, the Rust coreutils pass 522 of the 618 tests in the GNU test suite. In the March 2025 release, there were still 507 tests. Instead of 69, only 65 tests failed. At the same time, the number of skipped tests was reduced from 41 to 31. In addition, various applications run faster with the update, including cat, ls and wc. According to the developers, their performance is now comparable to the GNU coreutils. In some cases, the speeds of the Rust applications are also higher than their counterparts in C.

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Furthermore, with the update to version 0.1, several applications of the Rust coreutils have been integrated into SELinux, including cp, ls, mkdir and install. SELinux is an extension of the Linux kernel with which an administrator can determine the access of programs to files and resources. It is mainly used with Red Hat and its offshoots. Debian and Ubuntu primarily rely on the alternative AppArmor and only partially support SELinux. SELinux only replaced the previous access protection in openSUSE Tumbleweed in February 2025.

Ubuntu 25.10 brings Rust Coreutils

Although users can continue to use their existing scripts with 100% compatibility between the coreutils in Rust and C and should not notice any differences, some developers see potential advantages in the Rust variant. Jon Saeger, Head of Development at Canonical, referred to reduced vulnerability to attacks and better memory management. The Ubuntu version 25.10 planned for October 2025 should therefore include the Rust coreutils. They could then also become part of the LTS version Ubuntu 26.04.

(sfe)