rustix

A Bytecode Alliance project

rustix provides efficient memory-safe and I/O-safe wrappers to POSIX-like, Unix-like, Linux, and Winsock syscall-like APIs, with configurable backends. It uses Rust references, slices, and return values instead of raw pointers, and I/O safety types instead of raw file descriptors, providing memory safety, I/O safety, and provenance. It uses Results for reporting errors, bitflags instead of bare integer flags, an Arg trait with optimizations to efficiently accept any Rust string type, and several other efficient conveniences.

rustix is low-level and, and while the net API supports Windows Sockets 2 (Winsock), the rest of the APIs do not support Windows; for higher-level and more portable APIs built on this functionality, see the cap-std, memfd, timerfd, and io-streams crates, for example.

rustix currently has two backends available:

• linux_raw, which uses raw Linux system calls and vDSO calls, and is supported on Linux on x86-64, x86, aarch64, riscv64gc, powerpc64le, arm (v5 onwards), mipsel, and mips64el, with stable, nightly, and 1.65 Rust.

  • By being implemented entirely in Rust, avoiding libc, errno, and pthread cancellation, and employing some specialized optimizations, most functions compile down to very efficient code, which can often be fully inlined into user code.
  • Most functions in linux_raw preserve memory, I/O safety, and pointer provenance all the way down to the syscalls.

• libc, which uses the libc crate which provides bindings to native libc libraries on Unix-family platforms, and windows-sys for Winsock on Windows, and is portable to many OS's.

The linux_raw backend is enabled by default on platforms which support it. To enable the libc backend instead, either enable the "use-libc" cargo feature, or set the RUSTFLAGS environment variable to --cfg=rustix_use_libc when building.

Cargo features

The modules rustix::io, rustix::buffer, rustix::fd, rustix::ffi, and rustix::ioctl are enabled by default. The rest of the API modules are conditional with cargo feature flags.

Name	Description
event	rustix::event—Polling and event operations.
fs	rustix::fs—Filesystem operations.
io_uring	rustix::io_uring—Linux io_uring.
mm	rustix::mm—Memory map operations.
mount	rustix::mount—Linux mount API.
net	rustix::net—Network-related operations.
param	rustix::param—Process parameters.
pipe	rustix::pipe—Pipe operations.
process	rustix::process—Process-associated operations.
pty	rustix::pty—Pseudoterminal operations.
rand	rustix::rand—Random-related operations.
shm	rustix::shm—POSIX shared memory.
stdio	—Stdio-related operations.

This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗