This Month in Rust OSDev: October 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.
- This Month in Redox - October 2024
- Smart pointers for the kernel
- On Rust in enterprise kernels
- Unsafe Rust Is Harder Than C
- Version
v2.0.0ofthiserrorreleased withno_stdsupport
Infrastructure and Tooling
In this section, we collect recent updates to rustc, cargo, and other tooling that are relevant to Rust OS development.
- Taking a raw ref (
&raw (const|mut)) of a deref of pointer (*ptr) is always safe - mark some target features as 'forbidden' so they cannot be (un)set with
-Ctarget-feature - make
unsupported_calling_conventionsa hard error
rust-osdev Projects
In this section, we give an overview of notable changes to the projects hosted under the rust-osdev organization.
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:
- uefi-macros: Require that the entry function takes zero args
- uefi: Delete the deprecated
uefi::table::{boot,system}modules - uefi: Derive Eq/PartialEq for GptPartitionEntry
- uefi: Add CStr16 conversions from slices with interior nuls
- uefi: Improve the VariableKey type and iterator
- Update timeline section of funcs_migration.md
- xtask: Add action to generate a code coverage report
- nix: add cargo-llvm-cov to nix shell + niv update
- Codecov configuration updates
- Move DeviceType and DeviceSubType enums to uefi-raw
- Add device path node types to uefi-raw
- release: uefi-raw-0.9.0, uefi-macros-0.17.0, uefi-0.33.0
- Increase MSRV to 1.79
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:
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 @ZR233 for their contributions!
ovmf-prebuilt
Maintained by @nicholasbishop and @phil-opp
The ovmf-prebuilt project provides pre-built edk2 releases to make it easier to set up OVMF. We merged the following improvement this month:
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.
We merged the following PRs this month:
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 @Hsy-Intel 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.