This Month in Rust OSDev (September 2021)

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.

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 September, we merged the following changes:

• Add clean_up and clean_up_with_filter for deallocating unused page tables
• Add exception vector type
• Bump bit_field to 0.10.1
• Release version 0.14.5
• Move segment types into a new registers::segmentation module
• Release version 0.14.6

Thanks to @Freax13, @npmccallum, and @mkroening for their contributions!

uefi-rs

The uefi crate provides safe and performant wrappers for UEFI, the successor to the BIOS.

This month, we merged the following changes:

• Improve macro errors
• Implement missing methods of DebugSupport
• macros: add compilation tests
• Remove attribute to enable const_panic
• Add a test command to build.py and also use it in the CI

Thanks to @necauqua and @timrobertsdev for their contributions!

bootloader

The bootloader crate implements a custom Rust-based bootloader for easy loading of 64-bit ELF executables.

We finally merged a long-desired feature this month:

• Framebuffer configuration (published as v0.10.9)

Thanks to @anellie for this contribution!

multboot2

The multiboot2 crate provides abstraction types for the boot information of multiboot2 bootloaders.

It is now part of a workspace and lives next to the new crate multiboot2-header.

The following changes were merged this month:

• Code style improvements + optional CI job (clippy, rustfmt, rustdoc)
• std in tests; hash for TagType
• editorconfig file
• prepared cargo workspace, as discussed in PR #79

The changes were published as v0.12.2.

multboot2-header (new)

The multiboot2-header crate provides abstraction types for the Multiboot2 header and a builder struct to construct these headers. The corresponding repository was prepared (#86) and the initial release is expected in early October. See #95 for more details.

Call for Participation

Want to contribute to a Rust OSDev project, but don't know where to start? Pick up one of these outstanding issues in one of our projects and get started!

• (phil-opp/blog_os) Looking for a reviewer for a French translation

If you maintain a Rust OSDev project and are looking for contributors, especially for tasks suited to people getting started in this space, please create a PR against the next branch with the tasks you want to include in the next issue.

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)

We merged two small fixes to the Writing an OS in Rust blog this month:

• Fix typos in code examples in Async/Await post
• Fix link syntax in Russian translation

Thanks to @jongillham and @non-descriptive for these contributions!

I don't have any notable news about the upcoming third edition of the blog yet, but I'm doing my best to get back up to speed soon.

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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