Rust OSDev Operating System Development in Rust

This Month in Rust OSDev: April 2024

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.

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:

Thanks to @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. Recently, we deprecated the [uefi-services] crate and removed all usages from the uefi repository. A new drop-in replacement exists in uefi::helpers.

The test of time showed us that having a single crate with multiple cargo features is a better and more productive way forward with less maintenance burden - for users/consumers as well as maintainers.

Please find more information in:

We merged the following PRs this month:

Thanks to @sky5454 for their contributions!

ucs2-rs

Maintained by @GabrielMajeri, @nicholasbishop, and @phip1611

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:

Thanks to @rw-vanc for their contribution!

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:

Thanks to @mkroening 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:

multiboot2

Maintained by @phip1611

The multiboot2 crate provides abstraction types for the multiboot information structure (MBI) of multiboot2 bootloaders. We merged the following changes this month:

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.

RatCornu/efs

efs is a recently published no-std library which provides an OS and architecture independent implementation of some UNIX filesystems in Rust.

Currently only the ext2 filesystem is directly implemented, but I will soonly work on other filesystems!

It's still young so it may contain bugs, but it's hugely tested so that it does not happen.

Some of the features provided :

  • no_std support (enabled by default)
  • General interface for UNIX files and filesystems
  • read/write regular files
  • retrieve, add and remove directory entries directly from a path and a current working directory.

I hope you will find this useful! If you have any remark, idea or issue, do not hesitate to submit an issue!

phip1611/tar-no-std

tar-no-std supports a relevant subset of Tar archives to extract multiple files from a single Tar archive in no_std environments with zero allocations. Recently, v0.3.0 was released with support for filenames with up to 256 characters (including the directory path) and various bug fixes. Using fuzzing, a lot of pitfalls and sudden panics could be removed in this release.

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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