This Month in Rust OSDev (October 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.

uefi-rs

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

We merged the following PRs this month:

• Implement missing Event-related functions
• Remove attribute to enable const_panic
• Use build-std-features instead of rlibc
• Update set_virtual_address_map() to allow remapping of SystemTable
• Fix new clippy errors

Thanks to @timrobertsdev, @YtvwlD, and @foxcob for their contributions!

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, support for the Boot Graphics Resource Table (BGRT) table was added to acpi. This static table is passed from firmware to the OS to communicate information about the state of the screen when control is passed over, as lots of firmwares like to print display a logo when booting. (published as acpi v4.1.0)

Thanks to @ethindp for this contribution!

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 October, we merged the following changes:

• Enable manipulation of InterruptStackFrame
• Fix docs for page_table_index

Thanks to @haraldh and @Freax13 for their contributions!

multiboot2-header (new)

The multiboot2-header crate provides abstraction types for Multiboot2 headers, parsing utilities, and a builder to construct such headers. The initial release took place in early October and now is ready to be used. Because lots of code was published without any in-depth reviews, further testing and code reviews will be highly appreciated.

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!

If you maintain a Rust project related to operating system development 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 the following changes to the Writing an OS in Rust blog this month:

• Add French translation for the first post
  • Thanks to @Alekzus for this contribution, and @dallenng and @CBenoit for reviewing!
  • Published at https://os.phil-opp.com/fr/.
• Improve our integration of the giscus comment system
• Use Iosevka font for code blocks and inline code
• Initial Dark Mode Support 🌑
• Implement a switch for switching between light and dark mode
• Remember chosen theme in localStorage, add a switch for going back to system theme, improve layout
• Use crate-ci/typos action to check for typos

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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