This Month in Rust OSDev: December 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 OS - December 2024
• Video: Intro to Embassy : embedded development with async Rust
• 2025: The Year of COSMIC — Alpha 5 Released!
• Funding Opportunities - with Redox OS or on your own
  • The NGI Zero Commons Fund and NGI Zero Fediversity Fund each have a call for proposals with a Feb. 1 deadline. If the proposal is successful, it would be to start roughly in June or July (based on our experience) and run for up to 12 months, with an amount up to 50,000 EUR. There must be a "European component", so a EU-based developer would be an ideal fit, or perhaps a project where the maintainer is EU-based. Here are the links:
  • NGI Zero Commons Fund
  • NGI Zero Fediversity Fund
  • Redox is looking for a part-time or short-term developer to help with implementing device drivers, ACPI support, and similar, who would like to join our proposal. You must be knowledgeable in Rust and drivers, and have good reputation in the open source community. We have an existing relationship with NLnet, so we can craft the proposal, based on your skillset and our priorities. Please join us on Matrix and let us know you are interested.
  • https://matrix.to/#/#redox-join:matrix.org

Infrastructure and Tooling

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

• Improve default target options for x86_64-unknown-linux-none
• De-duplicate and improve definition of core::ffi::c_char

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:

• Fix clippy::needless_lifetimes in Rust 1.83 and ShimLock ABI on ia32
• Fix clippy::use_self
• uefi-raw: Add DriverBindingProtocol
• Increase MSRV to 1.81
• Update ptr_meta to 0.3.0
• Remove unstable gate for core::error::Error impls
• Use size_of/size_of_val/align_of/align_of_val from the prelude
• book: Set driver link-arg in build.rs

Thanks to @crawfxrd and @JarlEvanson 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:

• fix(idt): panic in impl fmt::Debug for EntryOptions
• Add MapperFlush method to get page
• feat: add update() to Cr3, Dr7, SFMask, UCet, SCet, mxcsr, rflags, and XCr0
• fix(model_specific): make {Fs,Gs,KernelGs}Base::write() unsafe
• Merge master into next

Thanks to @mkroening and @adavis628 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:

• Remove "UEFI boot" log message

Thanks to @ChocolateLoverRaj 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.

roeeshoshani/genesis

(Section written by @roeeshoshani)

genesis is a bare metal firmware implementation for mips. it implements everything from the bottom up, from initializing the cpu caches, to configuring pci devices and the interrupt controller.

i noticed that every kernel implementation is always for x86, so i decided to implement it for something a little more esoteric - mips.

the project is currently in very early stages but the basics are there.

it is my hobby project for me to learn about embedded programming.

feel free to follow along the development of it :).

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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