Open Source Summit + Embedded Linux Conference North America 2026

Moving from the manual memory management of C to the strict ownership model of Rust is more than a syntax swap; it is a fundamental shift in engineering philosophy. This talk provides a pragmatic roadmap for developers navigating this transition. We move beyond the academic "why" of memory safety to dive  deep into the "how" of refactoring legacy systems. The session explores the practicalities of Rustification, comparing the pitfalls of malloc and free, such as use-after-free and double-free vulnerabilities, with the compile-time guarantees provided by Rust’s Box, Arc, Borrow Checker and the Drop checker. Furthermore, we tackle how to translate manual pointer arithmetic into safe abstractions, practical strategies for using the Foreign Function Interface (FFI) to let Rust and C coexist during a gradual migration, and a real-world walk through of the "Rustification" of a C kernel module.

Target audience: Embedded Linux and kernel engineers with a foundational understanding of C driver concepts (like pointers and module structures). No prior Rust experience is required; the talk focuses on the practical type-system and architectural strategies used to safely bridge the two languages.