They may apply better than one might think: the example SPI driver posted at https://lwn.net/Articles/863459/ https://lwn.net/Articles/863459/ only has two case

They may apply better than one might think: the example SPI driver posted at https://lwn.net/Articles/863459/ https://lwn.net/Articles/863459/ only has two cases of unsafe. Of course, the kernel:: -modules it uses undoubtedly have more, but I imagine the idea is to provide abstractions that allow actual driver code not to use unsafe. And then there's stuff like file system code, that—I imagine—would require no more uses of unsafe than a database server written in Rust.