This Month in Rust OSDev: May 2022

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

Maintained by @GabrielMajeri and @nicholasbishop

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

We merged the following changes in May:

Improvements

• Change logger max level to be set by feature
• Release new versions of the crates (published uefi v0.16.0, uefi-macros v0.7.0, and uefi-services v0.13.0)
• Implement Deref and DerefMut for ScopedProtocol
• Implement core::fmt::Write for Serial
• Add documentation links

Fixes

• Fix an accidental *const conversion
• Fix compilation of the xtask package under Windows and add to CI
• Switch back to automatic Debug derive for Header struct
• Check table version before calling UEFI 2.0+ functions

Thanks to @JonahPlusPlus, @raccog, and @verticalegg for their contributions!

bootloader

Maintained by @phil-opp, @rybot666, and @64

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

• Add UEFI PXE support to load a kernel from a TFTP server

This feature will be part of the upcoming v0.11 release. Thanks to @Freax13 for this contribution!

pci_types

The pci_types library provides types for accessing and configuring PCI devices from Rust operating systems. Lots of this code (e.g. identifying devices by class codes) can be shared between projects, and would benefit from community contributions.

We merged the following change in May:

• PCI capabilities and status register support

Thanks to @alesharik for this contribution!

xhci

Maintained by @toku-sa-n

The xhci crate provides types of xHCI structures, such as Registers and TRBs.

We merged the following fix this month:

• fix(StructuralParameters2): Bit range in max_scratchpad_buffers_hi (published as v0.8.4)

Thanks to @Yuna-Tomi for this contribution!

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.

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.

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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