Canonical has increased its support for memory-safe software by becoming a gold sponsor of the Trifecta Tech Foundation with an annual contribution of €40,000.
The sponsorship funds development of Rust-based utilities for Ubuntu. It builds on prior collaboration that made sudo-rs the default privilege escalation tool in Ubuntu 25.10 and 26.04 LTS.
The foundation's projects include ntpd-rs, a Rust rewrite of time synchronization tools. This replaces older components as part of Canonical's effort to oxidize Ubuntu with memory-safe alternatives.
ntpd-rs has run in production at Let's Encrypt since June 2024. Canonical targets its inclusion in Ubuntu 26.10 for testing, with plans to make it the default tool in the 27.04 release.
Additional work covers feature parity, security profiles, and support for protocols like PTP and gPTP.
