Everyone’s favorite Unix init system is adding support for the Unix world’s favorite new programming language. What’s the worst that could happen? Don’t worry, this isn’t here just yet. Agent P and his trusty team released systemd version 262 about a month ago. That means that systemd 263 is now under construction, and developer Christian Brauner announced on Mastodon that his new feature has been merged. The previous effort, which was pull request #44144, has now been split into five separate parts. Part 1 contains keyring-util and voa-util , described as "helpers for enrolling certificates into kernel keyrings." Part 2, support programs written in Rust , is the banner item. Then come a few more: bind only the headers Rust code uses , wrap the libsystemd-shared helpers systemd-keyring-setup needs , and finally, add systemd-keyring-setup . There are several important riders to the announcement, and these are spelled out in the second PR: "Rust is only used for new leaf components. Existing C code isn’t ported and nothing that other components depend on is written in Rust." In other words, before anyone gets too excited, this does not indicate the start of an effort to rewrite systemd in Rust. All it means is that new systemd modules can be written in Rust. The second bullet point will be more significant for existing Rust developers: "No cargo. Everything is built with meson." Cargo is the Rust language’s package manager and build system…
