This Month in Rust OSDev: February 2025

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 - January 2025
• RSoC 2024: Dynamic Linking - Part 2
• Asterinas in 2024
  • Asterinas is a Linux ABI-compatible OS written from scratch in Rust
• Towards Practical Formal Verification for a General-Purpose OS in Rust
• Writing a Simple Windows Driver in Rust
• FOSDEM talk: Rust for Linux
• No-Panic Rust: A Nice Technique for Systems Programming
• PSA: uuid's getrandom update may break no-std V4/V7 users
• The Embedded Rustacean: Issue #39 and Issue #40

Infrastructure and Tooling

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

• Create a generic AVR target: avr-none
• x86: use SSE2 to pass float and SIMD types
• add x86-sse2 (32bit) ABI that requires SSE2 target feature
• Update to LLVM 20

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:

• relicensing: Rewrite PR "DevicePathToText and DevicePathFromText Protocol"
• Relicense to "MIT OR Apache-2.0"
• Add SPDX headers
• release: uefi-raw-0.10.0, uefi-macros-0.18.0, uefi-0.34.0
• uefi: Update license info in docstring
• release: uefi-0.34.1
• uefi-raw: add Boolean type
• uefi-raw: use new Boolean type
• xtask/uefi-raw: improve check-raw error messages
• Fix upcoming lints in clippy 1.85
• uefi: clarify situation with boot::memory_map() and Status::BUFFER_TOO_SMALL
• Fix uefi-raw MSRV build, and improve CI for MSRV
• Add PXE types to uefi-raw
• uefi: Replace definition of MacAddress with a re-export from uefi-raw
• Use bitflags definitions from uefi-raw in uefi's pxe module
• uefi: Fix the BufferSize argument in SimpleNetwork::transmit
• Use newtype enum definitions from uefi-raw in uefi's pxe module

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:

• Update x86_64 to 0.15.2
• change rustc-abi in custom targets to x86-softfloat
• [v0.9] change rustc-abi in custom targets to x86-softfloat
• Release v0.11.10
• Update uart_16550 to 0.3.2
• Specify kernel-code virt addr in BootloaderConfig
• Use Result::ok

Thanks to @Stazer, @Wasabi375, and @ChocolateLoverRaj 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:

• Ensure that addition and subtraction of addresses panics on overflow/underflow
• don't pass -Crelocation-model=static to host targets

Thanks to @farnz for their contribution!

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:

• acpi: fix build errors

Thanks to @jellllly420 for their contribution!

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:

• Add 202408.01, 202411, and 202502 releases
• fix(deps): update rust crate ureq to v3
• Set Source::LATEST to EDK2_STABLE202502_R1
• release: 0.2.2 y

Thanks to @mkroening 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 projects updates were submitted 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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