This Month in Rust OSDev: February 2024

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.

• Redox OS - Porting Strategy
• This Month in Redox
• Tock Compiles on Stable Rust!
• Making an RISC-V OS (Part 2): Kernel in virtual addresses
• The Embedded Rustacean Issue 13 and Issue 14
• Linux Kernel: Rewrite the VP9 codec library in Rust
• Anouncing stabby 3.0.0

Infrastructure and Tooling

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

• only set noalias on Box with the global allocator
• Add stubs in IR and ABI for f16 and f128
• f16 and f128 step 2: intrinsics
• Add armv8r-none-eabihf target for the Cortex-R52
• Add a new wasm32-wasip1 target to rustc
• Add a new wasm32-wasi-preview2 target
• rename ptr::invalid -> ptr::without_provenance

rust-osdev Projects

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

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 PRs this month:

• Fix data layout in custom target used for testing
• optimize from_page_table_indices
• mark as 0.15 as beta release
• Release v0.14.12
• Fix release script
• Merge next into master: releasing v0.15.0-beta
• Update data layout of test target for LLVM 18
• optimize Step impl for VirtAddr
• Miscellaneous improvements
• Release v0.15.0

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:

• Add a method to create a MemoryMap from a raw buffer

Thanks to @bjorn3 for their contribution!

bootloader

Maintained by @phil-opp and @Freax13

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

• Set NO_EXECUTE flag for all writable memory regions
• [v0.9] Fix data layout for custom targets for LLVM 18
• [v0.9] Fix map errors during kernel loading
• [v0.9] Fix: unify flags if multiple segments are mapped to same frame with different flags
• Fix invalid mapping to zero page caused by off-by-one bug
• adapt data layout to match LLVM's
• Release v0.11.7
• Remove unused paging imports

Thanks to @vinc and @tsatke for their contributions!

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.

No projects updates were submitted this month.

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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