Rust OSDev Operating System Development in Rust

This Month in Rust OSDev: August 2023

Published on (edited by @phil-opp)

Welcome to a new issue of "This Month in Rust OSDev". In these posts, we give a regular overview of notable changes in the Rust operating system development ecosystem.

This series is openly developed on GitHub. Feel free to open pull requests there with content you would like to see in the next issue. If you find some issues on this page, please report them by creating an issue or using our comment form at the bottom of this page.

Announcements, News, and Blog Posts

Here we collect news, blog posts, etc. related to OS development in Rust.

Redox Summer of Code

Infrastructure and Tooling

In this section, we collect recent updates to rustc, cargo, and other tooling that are relevant to Rust OS development.

rust-osdev Projects

In this section, we give an overview of notable changes to the projects hosted under the rust-osdev organization.

uefi-rs

Maintained by @GabrielMajeri, @nicholasbishop, and @phip1611

The uefi-rs crate provides safe and performant wrappers for UEFI, the successor to the BIOS. We merged the following PRs this month:

Thanks to @cmoylan and @julic20s for their contributions!

bootloader

Maintained by @phil-opp

The bootloader crate implements a custom Rust-based bootloader for easy loading of 64-bit ELF executables. This month, we merged the following PRs:

Thanks to @frisoft, @devsnek, and @kuzeyardabulut for their contributions!

x86_64

Maintained by @phil-opp, @josephlr, and @Freax13

The x86_64 crate provides various abstractions for x86_64 systems, including wrappers for CPU instructions, access to processor-specific registers, and abstraction types for architecture-specific structures such as page tables and descriptor tables.

We merged the following PR this month:

Thanks to @tsoutsman, @NathanKolpa, and @xzmeng for their contributions!

acpi

Maintained by @IsaacWoods

The acpi repository contains crates for parsing the ACPI tables – data structures that the firmware of modern computers use to relay information about the hardware to the OS. We merged the following changes this month:

Thanks to @alnyan for their contributions!

uart_16550

Maintained by @phil-opp

The uart_16550 crate provides basic support for serial port I/O for 16550-compatible UARTs. We merged the following change this month:

Thanks to @phip1611 for their contributions!

Other Projects

In this section, we describe updates to Rust OS projects that are not directly related to the rust-osdev organization. Feel free to create a pull request with the updates of your OS project for the next post.

mkroening/take-static

(Section written by @mkroening)

I published a tiny new crate, allowing you to get a mutable reference to static items safely (only once, though):

use take_static::take_static;

take_static! {
    static NUMBER: usize = 5;
}

assert_eq!(NUMBER.take(), Some(&mut 5));
assert_eq!(NUMBER.take(), None);

This allows you to easily use statically allocated memory before dynamic memory allocators may be available. Compared to cortex_m::singleton, take_static is thread-safe. Compared to takecell::TakeCell, take_static also supports !Send types.

hermit-os/kernel

(Section written by @mkroening)

The Hermit unikernel project allows you to bundle your Rust application with our library operating system to create a bootable unikernel image. Hermit is a single-address-space operating system. Since there is only one application running in the virtual machine, no isolation between applications or between user space and kernel space is necessary. This reduces system call overhead immensely, since every system call is just a library call. For more information, see our The Hermit Operating System showcase post.

The RustyHermit project has been renamed. We have renamed our GitHub organization from @hermitcore to @hermit-os and reserved the http://hermit-os.org domain.

We have also renamed some of our core projects to reduce confusion:

We have a new logo! As hermit crabs occupy empty shells produced by other organisms, the original HermitCore occupied one or several cores on a computer. Because we migrated to Rust in 2018, our new logo of a hermit crab occupying the Rust logo's bike gear fits quite nicely with the Rust logo as well as Rust's Ferris.

And as always, please come and try Hermit! :)

phil-opp/blog_os

(Section written by @phil-opp)

We merged the following changes to the Writing an OS in Rust blog this month:

Thanks to @Connortsui20 and @xzmeng for these contributions!

Join Us?

Are you interested in Rust-based operating system development? Our rust-osdev organization is always open to new members and new projects. Just let us know if you want to join! A good way for getting in touch is our Zulip chat.

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