This Month in Rust OSDev: June 2024

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 OS - Software Showcase #1
  • This is our first showcase video, showing several programs running on Redox OS
• This Month in Redox - June 2024
• k23 - Experimental WASM Microkernel
  • First announced at RustNL 2024, k23 is an experimental microkernel written in Rust that runs WebAssembly programs. Now Open Source!

Infrastructure and Tooling

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

• Split core's PanicInfo and std's PanicInfo
• Stabilize PanicInfo::message() and PanicMessage
• Unsafe extern blocks
• Size optimize int formatting
• Add f16 inline ASM support for RISC-V

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:

• uefi: Stop enabling error_in_core feature
• reorganize deps
• uefi: Add TryFrom u8 slice to DevicePathHeader
• test-runner: Consistently use global image handle
• uefi: Add TryFrom u8 slice to DevicePathNode
• Clean up duplicate global system table pointer in uefi::helpers
• uefi: make DevicePathHeader::try_from idiomatic
• uefi: Add TryFrom u8 slice to DevicePath
• uefi: re-export CapsuleFlags
• ci: Temporarily turn off warnings-as-errors for nightly CI jobs
• uefi: use UNSPECIFIED_TIMEZONE instead of magic number
• uefi: Make TimeError more descriptive
• Fix versions
• uefi-test-runner: speed up ploting of sierpinski triangle by updating changed pixel only
• memory map: improvements to fight pitfalls (MemoryMap now owns the memory)
• uefi: simplify usage of Mode
• template: fix build failure
• uefi: Add TryFrom<&[u8]> for Time

Thanks to @LightAndLight, @andre-braga, and @JeffLi01 for their contributions!

bootloader

Maintained by @phil-opp and @Freax13

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

• Guard the lower 1MB of memory

Thanks to @Wasabi375 for their contributions!

pci_types

Maintained by @IsaacWoods

The pci_types library provides types for accessing and configuring PCI devices from Rust operating systems. We merged the following change this month:

• feat: accept FnOnce for updating commands
• ci: add workflow
• feat: don't truncate reserved bits in CommandRegister
• fix(breaking): clippy lints
• style: update rustfmt.toml
• feat: derive additional traits for CommandRegister
• feat: add EndpointHeader::update_interrupt
• feat: don't take explicit references to ConfigRegionAccess
• feat: implement Copy for all types that already implement Clone
• fix: don't take explicit reference in update_interrupt
• Add method to get the address of any capability
• Fix docs rendering for MsixCapability::set_enabled
• feat: make update_command take &mut self
• Add method to enable/disable function masking for MSI-X
• Add unwrap_io and unwrap_mem convenience methods on Bar
• Remove the function_exists method of ConfigRegionAccess
• Support 64-bit addressing in MSI capabilities and improve uniformity with rest of library

Thanks to @IsaacWoods, @bjorn3, and @mkroening 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:

• constify PhysFrame functions

volatile

Maintained by @phil-opp

The volatile crate provides a safe wrapper type for implementing volatile read and write operations. This is useful for accessing memory regions that have side-effects, such as memory-mapped hardware registers.

We merged the following PR this month:

• Release v0.6.0

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.

nicholasbishop/ext4-view-rs

(Section written by @nicholasbishop)

I've released a new Rust crate for reading ext4 filesystems. It's easy to use, with an API very similar to std::fs. The crate is no-std compatible, but does require an allocator.

Note that by design this crate will remain read-only; writing to an ext4 filesystem is not a goal.

Thanks to @tedbrandston for doing a ton of code review on this project!

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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