Rust OSDev Operating System Development in Rust

This Month in Rust OSDev: September 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.

multiboot2

Maintained by @phip1611

Convenient and safe parsing of Multiboot2 Boot Information (MBI) structures and the contained information tags. Usable in no_std environments, such as a kernel. An optional builder feature also allows the construction of the corresponding structures.

Last month, we talked about the major milestone of the v0.22 release of the multiboot2 crate, where all Undefined Behaviour (UB) and a bunch of safety and memory issues have been removed / fixed. After a short grace-period of one month, we now yanked all prior releases. As all of them contain UB, sensitive low-level software can break in subtle ways.

We hope that all users can have a smooth migration to v0.22 or above (with Rust 1.70 from June 2023 as MSRV). If there are problems, we are happy to temporarily unyank certain versions or create a v0.22.x with a lower MSRV. We can discuss this here.

Further, we released v0.23 which contains dependency bumps and missing tags. Specifically:

  • ApmTag
  • BootdevTag
  • NetworkTag

Please find more in the changelog.

We merged the following PRs this month:

Thanks to @filiplajszczak for their contributions!

uefi-rs

Maintained by @GabrielMajeri, @nicholasbishop, and @phip1611

uefi makes it easy to develop Rust software that leverages safe, convenient, and performant abstractions for UEFI functionality.

We merged the following PRs this month:

xhci

Maintained by @toku-sa-n

The xhci crate provides types of xHCI structures, such as Registers and TRBs. We merged the following PRs this month:

Thanks to @dbydd for their contributions!

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 @jokemanfire, and @Hsy-Intel for their contributions!

pci_types

Maintained by @IsaacWoods

The pci_types library provides types for accessing and configuring PCI devices from Rust operating systems. We merged the following change this month:

Thanks to @bjorn3 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 updates were proposed for this section 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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