This Month in Rust OSDev (June 2020)

Welcome to a new issue of "This Month in Rust OSDev". In these posts, we will 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.

Project Updates

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

x86_64

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.

In June, the crate received some smaller improvements:

• Remove needless try_into calls to fix clippy warnings
• Correct Cr2::read documentation
• Export PhysAddrNotValid and VirtAddrNotValid (published as v0.11.1)

Thanks to @samueltardieu and @leecannon for their contributions!

cargo-xbuild

The cargo-xbuild project provides cargo command wrappers to cross-compile the sysroot crates core and alloc. This month, support for the cargo-features manifest key was added and a deprecated dependency was replaced:

• Propagate cargo-features from project's Cargo.toml (published as v0.5.34)
• Replace tempdir with tempfile (published as v0.5.35)

Thanks to @eggyal and @Eijebong for these contributions!

bootloader

The bootloader crate implements a custom Rust-based bootloader for easy loading of 64-bit ELF executables. This month, we fixed a newly introduced Rust warning:

• Rename _improper_ctypes_check functions (published as v0.9.5)

Thanks to @Freax13 for this contribution!

While we do not have to report any news yet, we are still working on a rewrite of the crate in order to make it more robust (use Rust instead of assembly for boot stages) and composable (in order to add UEFI and multiboot2 support).

acpi

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. This month, the crate received two small improvements to the RSDP-related code:

• Use RSDP's length field in revisions 1+
• Use fold to sum RSDP bytes

uefi

The uefi crate provides abstractions for the UEFI standard that replaces the traditional BIOS on modern systems. This month, the contribution docs were extended with information how to add new UEFI protocols:

• Tutorial on how to add protocols

Personal Projects

In this section, we describe updates to personal 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.

phil-opp/blog_os

(Section written by @phil-opp)

In June, I pushed two small improvements to the blog_os repository and the Writing an OS in Rust blog:

• Create a testable trait for printing test messages automatically. This required updates to some blog posts:
  • Update Testing post to use Testable trait for automatic printing
  • Update remaining posts: Remove superfluous printing from tests
• Do a volatile read in stack_overflow test to avoid tail recursion. This required an update to the Double Faults post:
  • Update Double Faults post to prevent tail recursion in test

There were also lots of small contributions this month that fixed typos and dead links and updated the Chinese translation. Thanks a lot to all contributors!

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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