Then Linus is wrong because the unsafe keyword has nothing to do with no-panic guarantees? Unsafe correlates with memory safety / UB, so using it in a different way in the kernel would be flat out wrong.

The language determines the definition of its constructs, not the software being written with it.

Edit: It's worth mentioning that while I think he is wrong, I think it's symptomatic of there not being a keyword/designation in Rust to express what Linus is trying to say. I would completely oppose misusing the unsafe keyword since it has negative downstream effects on all future dependency crates, where it's not clear what characteristics "unsafe" refers to which causes a split. So maybe they need to just discuss a different way to label these for now and agree to improve it later.