This Month in Rust OSDev: March 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.

• An IRC client in your motherboard
• octox: Writing a Unix-like OS in Rust
• This Month in Redox
• Redox Kernel Improvements
• MOROS 0.10.3
• The server chose violence: Hubris's oddest syscall
• Red Hat's Long, Rust'ed Road Ahead For Nova As Nouveau Driver Successor
• A memory model for Rust code in the Linux kernel
• Embedded Rust Bluetooth on ESP: BLE Client
• EtherCrab 0.4: Distributed Clocks, io_uring, Derives, Oh My
• The Embedded Rustacean: Issue 15 and Issue 16

Infrastructure and Tooling

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

• Add basic trait impls for f16 and f128
• Add aarch64-apple-visionos and aarch64-apple-visionos-sim tier 3 targets
• Changes to Rust's WASI targets
• RFC: patchable-function-entry was merged
• unsafe attributes RFC completed FCP
• FCP complete to stabilize raw slice len() method (slice_ptr_len, const_slice_ptr_len)
• stabilize ptr.is_aligned
• downgrade ptr.is_aligned_to crate-private
• transmute: caution against int2ptr transmutation
• New RFC: Add realign_stack attribute to rustc
• c_unwind full stabilization request: change in extern "C" behavior

rust-osdev Projects

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

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. We merged the following changes this month:

• AML: Correctly invoke _SEG,_BBN, and _ADR methods for PCI region accesses, plus assorted bits
• acpi: Add SdtHeaderIterator to get all headers.
• aml: add extra debug info on parsing error
• AML: implement boolean field

Thanks to @fslongjin and @rw-vanc 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 PRs this month:

• miscellaneous improvements
• release v0.15.0
• doc: added help on update_flags to get flags
• Feat: add constructor for InterruptStackFrameValue
• properly jump the address gap in CleanUp
• expose DEBUG_STR more directly
• add write_pcid_no_flush
• release 0.15.1
• Implement function for creating a gdt in a const environment

Thanks to @uglyoldbob, @GZTimeWalker, and @Sxmourai for their contributions!

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:

• Change gitter badge to zulip badge
• avoid 32-bit relocation to __BOOTLOADER_CONFIG

Thanks to @nicholasbishop, and @Freax13 for their contributions!

ucs2-rs

Maintained by @GabrielMajeri, @nicholasbishop, and @phip1611

• Update Cargo.toml metadata
• Add a short changelog
• Add auto-release workflow
• Set MSRV and add CI job to check it
• Improve test coverage

pic8259

Maintained by @phil-opp

The pic_8259 crate provides abstractions for 8259 and 8259A Programmable Interrupt Controllers (PICs).

We merged the following PR this month:

• Update x86_64 dependency to version 0.15.0

Thanks to @iTitus for their contribution!

ovmf-prebuilt

Maintained by @phil-opp and @nicholasbishop

The ovmf-prebuilt project provides pre-built edk2 releases to make it easier to set up OVMF. We merged the following improvement this month:

• Transition to a workspace
• Add empty ovmf-prebuilt package
• fix(deps): update rust crate clap to v4.5.4

volatile

Maintained by @phil-opp

The volatile crate provides a safe wrapper type for implementing volatile read and write operations. This is useful for accessing memory regions that have side-effects, such as memory-mapped hardware registers.

We merged the following PRs this month:

• Implement some useful traits
• Fix clippy warning about clone implementation
• Fix build with very_unstable feature
• Remove Sized requirement for Send and Sync on VolatileRef

Thanks to @nspin and @kadiwa4 for their contributions!

linked-list-allocator

Maintained by @phil-opp and @jamesmunns

The linked-list-allocator crate provides a basic no_std allocator that builds a linked list from freed memory blocks and thus needs no additional data structures. We merged the following PR this month:

• Remove stabilized feature

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:

• uefi: Derive Hash for all char and string types
• uefi_raw: Add firmware_storage module
• Use auto-release from crates.io to release
• uefi-services: Use "dep:" syntax
• release: uefi-raw-0.5.1, uefi-0.27.0, uefi-services-0.24.0
• Fix some new lints/warnings

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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