Rust OSDev Operating System Development in Rust

This Month in Rust OSDev: September 2023

Published on (edited by @phil-opp)

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.

Infrastructure and Tooling

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

rust-osdev Projects

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

multiboot2

Maintained by @phip1611

The multiboot2 was bumped from 0.18.1 to 0.19.0. The new release includes the ability to add custom tags to the MBI builder and a bugfix when parsing Multiboot strings, such as the command line from a Module tag.

For more details, please have a look at the changelog.

Thanks to @A0lson for their contribution that helped to fix the string parsing bug.

acpi

Maintained by @IsaacWoods

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, a new major version of acpi was published, offering greater control over how the crate allocates memory. Specifically, the new allocator_api and alloc features allow you to opt-out of allocation altogether (allowing the crate to be used from slimmer environments like bootloaders), or to provide your own allocator using the new (and still unstable) core::alloc::Allocator API. Enabling both features makes the crate behave very similarly to before, so migration should be relatively easy.

Because the acpi crate can now be used from environements without allocation, the rsdp crate has been deprecated, and all functionality moved into acpi. The rsdp crate will continue to work, but will not receive further updates. This should not affect users using rsdp to simply find the address of the RSDP, but is a breaking change as types that have been moved to acpi will no longer be usable across the crate boundary.

Some improvements were also made to the aml crate this month, adding functionality and improving our correctness

  • many thanks to our contributors!

We merged the following changes this month:

Thanks to @alnyan 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:

Thanks to @brandonchinn178 and @mkroening for their contributions!

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:

Thanks to @JohnAZoidberg for their contribution!

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.

mkroening/interrupts

(Section written by @mkroening)

I created a dependency-free interrupts crate, allowing you to temporarily disable interrupts on AArch64, 64-bit RISC-V, and x86-64. Two different paradigms allow you to run code without interrupts and synchronize with interrupt handlers running on the same hardware thread (core):

Use disable to disable interrupts with a guard:

// interrupts may or may not be enabled
let guard = interrupts::disable();
// interrupts are disabled
drop(guard);
// interrupts are restored to the previous state

Use without (similar to x86_64::instructions::interrupts::without_interrupts) to run a closure with disabled interrupts:

// interrupts may or may not be enabled
interrupts::without(|| {
    // interrupts are disabled
});
// interrupts are restored to the previous state

I would appreciate you dropping by and giving it a try. :)

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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