Developers keen to write Windows drivers in Rust now have improved tools and samples, but progress is slow and obstacles to production use remain.

Senior software engineer Nate Deisinger has reported on the current state of Rust for developing Windows drivers. The news is mixed. On the plus side, Deisinger said that Rust crates (packages) exist for creating valid Windows 11 drivers using WDM (Windows Driver Model), KMDF (kernel-mode driver framework), or UMDF (user-mode driver framework). WDM is the older, low-level approach, while KMDF and UMDF are the higher-level abstractions that most developers use.

That said, Deisinger warned that drivers using these crates "still need to make use of unsafe blocks for interacting with the Windows operating system," removing some of the benefits of

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