Rust OSDev Operating System Development in Rust

This Month in Rust OSDev: May 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.

endian-num (new project!)

Maintained by @mkroening

The endian-num crate provides the Be (big-endian) and Le (little-endian) byte-order-aware numeric types.

Thanks to @mkroening for creating and maintaining this crate!

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 @stillinbeta and @andre-braga 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:

Thanks to @fmckeogh and @Wasabi375 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:

Thanks to @Wasabi375 for their contribution!

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:

Thanks to @YtvwlD for their contribution!

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:

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/free-list

(Section written by @mkroening)

The free-list crate provides the FreeList type for managing virtual or physical memory. Opposed to normal memory allocators, FreeList does not use pointers but page ranges. It operates by keeping a list of free page ranges (hence the name) and allows allocating at user-provided ranges. Instead of operating directly on the unallocated memory through a linked list, this free list uses statically allocated memory before dynamically allocating more memory to hold its elements.

use free_list::{FreeList, PageLayout};

let mut free_list = FreeList::<16>::new();

unsafe {
    free_list.deallocate((0x1000..0x5000).try_into().unwrap()).unwrap();
}
assert_eq!(free_list.free_space(), 0x4000);

let layout = PageLayout::from_size(0x4000).unwrap();
assert_eq!(free_list.allocate(layout).unwrap(), (0x1000..0x5000).try_into().unwrap());

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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