This Month in Rust OSDev: March 2026

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.

Please submit interesting posts and projects for the next issue on Zulip or via a PR on GitHub.

Announcements, News, and Blog Posts

Here we collect news, blog posts, etc. related to OS development in Rust.

• Redox OS: Capability-based Security — Namespace and CWD
• Ferrous Systems: "Accessing Hardware in Rust"
  • Compares four Rust hardware abstraction approaches (svd2rust, tock-registers, safe-mmio, derive-mmio) for bare-metal programming.
• How to use storytelling to fit inline assembly into Rust
  • Proposes a "storytelling" approach where inline assembly blocks must correspond to equivalent Rust code, ensuring soundness and allowing compiler optimizations.
• Video: Writing a Linux GPU Kernel Driver in Rust with Daniel Almeida
  • Interview about writing the Tyr GPU kernel driver for Arm Mali hardware in Rust.
• Ariel OS v0.4.0
  • New release of this embedded Rust RTOS adds BLE on ESP32, USB CDC-NCM Ethernet, GNSS sensor support, and stack usage measurement.
• Elfina: Multi-architecture ELF Loader in Rust
  • Educational ELF loader supporting x86 and x86-64 Linux binaries, with mmap and memfd execution modes.
• VectorWare: "Rust threads on the GPU"
  • Maps Rust's std::thread API to GPU warps, enabling familiar concurrent Rust code to compile and run on GPU hardware.

Infrastructure and Tooling

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

• ACP: Introduce alloc::io
  • Approved proposal to move OS-independent parts of std::io to alloc, making IO traits available in no_std + alloc environments. The implementation PR is in progress.
• Make atomic primitives type aliases of Atomic<T>
  • Refactors all atomic types (AtomicI32, AtomicBool, etc.) into type aliases of a generic Atomic<T>.
  • Only types that implement the sealed AtomicPrimitive trait can be used with Atomic<T>
• Implement MaybeDangling compiler support
  • Adds compiler-level support for the MaybeDangling wrapper type, which relaxes aliasing assumptions on references. Important for unsafe code dealing with self-referential structures and raw memory.
• Constify Vec::{into, from}_raw_parts{_in|_alloc}
  • Makes Vec raw parts methods usable in const contexts.
• Target specs: stricter checks for LLVM ABI values, and correlate with cfg(target_abi)
  • Tightens ABI validation in target specs. Note: out-of-tree JSON custom targets may need updating.
• -Zbranch-protection is a target modifier
  • Makes -Zbranch-protection a target modifier, enforcing consistent application across the entire crate graph. Important for AArch64 kernel security (PAC/BTI).
• Defer codegen for the VaList Drop impl to actual uses
  • Allows compiling libcore with codegen backends that don't implement VaList (like Cranelift). Unblocks alternative backends for bare-metal work.

rust-osdev Projects

In this section, we give an overview of notable changes to the projects hosted under the rust-osdev organization.

uart_16550

Maintained by @phip1611

Simple yet highly configurable low-level driver for 16550 UART devices, typically known and used as serial ports or COM ports.

We've just released v0.5.0 - a complete rewrite and fresh start of the crate, implemented by @phip1611. The main motivation is to make the crate fit for working on real hardware, clean up technical debt, and streamline the code paths for x86 port I/O and MMIO. @phip1611 is also taking over maintenance of the crate, thanks a lot!

More info:

• https://github.com/rust-osdev/uart_16550/releases/tag/v0.5.0
• https://docs.rs/uart_16550/0.5.0/uart_16550/
• https://github.com/rust-osdev/uart_16550/pull/41

Special Thanks to Philipp Oppermann (@phil-opp) and Martin Kröning (@mkroening) for their very valuable review on the new crate!

After the rewrite, we merged the following changes this month:

• feat: implement embedded-io traits
• Rename byte transfer functions and update IO trait implementations
• Enhance MmioAddress safety and fix AArch64 instruction emission
• Improve documentation examples and streamline architecture support
• Add API test and improve memory safety in MMIO constructors

Thanks to @mkroening 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:

• add join on Path
• uefi: serial: add read_exact() and write_exact() + fix core::fmt::Write for Serial
• runtime: add CStr16::from_bytes_with_nul for UCS-2 strings in UEFI Variables
• Replace a couple as casts with ptr::from_ref
• release: uefi-raw-0.14.0, uefi-0.37

Thanks to @the-shank 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:

• Improve handling of top-level names with new ResolveBehaviour system
• For discussion: A way of improving regression/integration testing for ASL snippets
• Use correct offset for PCI I/O
• Allow aml_tester to continue after an interpreter panic
• Apply search rules to lookups

Thanks to @martin-hughes 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 changes this month:

• feat: IOMMU support via edk2-platforms and IntelVTdDxe
• Rename build-edk2 to xtask
• Add build-edk2 action to xtask CLI
• xtask: Add update-sources action
• release: 0.2.8
• Update to 2024 edition

Thanks to @PelleKrab 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 changes:

• don't use BPB_TotSec16 to determine FAT type
• speed up BIOS bootloader

Thanks to @ic3w1ne for their contribution!

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:

• don't enable abi_x86_interrupt if not needed

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.

phil-opp/blog_os

(Section written by @phil-opp)

We merged the following changes to the Writing an OS in Rust blog this month:

• [Translation] translated post 10 into russian

Thanks to @TakiMoysha for their contribution!

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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