Rust ports of the example programs from The Linux Programming Interface (Kerrisk, 2010), updated to cover Linux APIs through kernel 6.x.

All 391 C example programs are being recreated as idiomatic Rust — not mechanical transliterations of C, but programs that leverage Rust's type system, iterator model, and ownership semantics while demonstrating the same Linux kernel interfaces.

Current status: 369 binaries implemented across 54 workspace members.

The primary syscall layer is rustix — a safe, zero-overhead Rust crate that wraps Linux syscalls with typed return values and OwnedFd rather than raw i32. Where rustix has gaps, nix fills them. libc is used only as a last resort for APIs that neither crate provides.

rustix  →  ~70% of TLPI topics (fs, process, net, mm, event, time, io_uring, mount)
nix     →  ~25% (POSIX mqueues, fanotify, epoll, user DB, dup2, clock_nanosleep)
libc    →   ~5% (SysV IPC, POSIX named semaphores, mq_notify, sched_setscheduler, sigwaitinfo)

The crate selection rationale and every libc:: call is audited in dev_docs/c_interop.md.

Each TLPI chapter maps to one Cargo workspace member. tlpi_common is a shared utility library (error types, daemon helpers, ename tables).

# Prerequisites
cargo install cargo-nextest cargo-llvm-cov cargo-deny cargo-machete just

# Compile the workspace
cargo check --workspace

# Build all binaries
cargo build --workspace

# Run a specific binary
cargo run -p fileio --bin copy -- src.txt dst.txt
cargo run -p signals --bin ouch

# Full quality gate (fmt → clippy → check → test → coverage)
just

# Individual steps
cargo fmt --check
cargo clippy --workspace --all-targets --all-features -- -D warnings
cargo nextest run --workspace

# Single crate
cargo nextest run -p signals

# Coverage report (HTML)
just cov-html

# Run destructive [A]-tagged tests (requires root / privileged container)
TLPI_ALLOW_DESTRUCTIVE=1 cargo nextest run --workspace --run-ignored=all

# Build the test image
just container-build

# Non-destructive tests (CI default)
just container-test

# Full privileged test suite (all [A]-tagged tests)
just container-test-privileged

The Docker image is a multi-stage Ubuntu 24.04 build with Rust stable + nightly, cargo-nextest, cargo-llvm-cov, just, and all required native libraries (libseccomp-dev, libacl1-dev, etc.) pre-installed.

Tests are classified by the resources they require:

Destructive tests are #[ignore] by default and check TLPI_ALLOW_DESTRUCTIVE=1 at runtime before proceeding.

• Idiomatic Rust, not transliterated C — iterators over index loops, ? propagation, match/if let over boolean checks, newtypes for raw integers crossing API boundaries.
• No unwrap() outside tests — every fallible call propagates via ?.
• unsafe requires a justification comment on the immediately preceding line.
• Every src/bin/*.rs has a //! doc comment explaining the TLPI section, the Linux concept, the key syscall(s), and any non-obvious kernel behaviour.
• libc usage is audited — dev_docs/c_interop.md documents every libc:: call and whether a rustix/nix replacement exists or why libc must be kept.

• The Linux Programming Interface — Michael Kerrisk, No Starch Press, 2010
• TLPI C source listings
• rustix documentation
• nix documentation
• Linux man pages