This Month in Rust OSDev: April 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.

• octopos: xv6-based operating system for RISC-V in Rust
  • A Rust port of xv6 that targets RISC-V and runs without the standard library, including process management, Sv39 page tables, VirtIO disk support, and a POSIX-style syscall interface.
• A minimal VMM in Rust with Apple Hypervisor
  • Walks through building a small virtual machine monitor on Apple Silicon macOS using Rust bindings to Apple's Hypervisor framework.
• Rust: Memory safety in kernel space
  • An OS-focused introduction to how Rust's ownership and unsafe boundaries change kernel development.
• Bringing Rust to the Pixel Baseband
  • Google describes adding Rust to Pixel modem firmware, including no_std support for Hickory DNS dependencies, core/alloc integration, allocator and panic handler hooks, and firmware linking details.
• tinyboot v0.4.0 Released -- The API is Stable
  • A minimal Rust bootloader for resource-constrained MCUs. This release adds CH32V00x support, collapses the CH32 crates, stabilizes the wire protocol, and fixes half-duplex UART bugs.
• Using Rust to Build a $1 Handheld Gaming Console
  • A small embedded Rust project on the CH32V003 RISC-V microcontroller, with notes on RAM-constrained rendering and fixed-point math.
• Zero-copy pages in Rust
  • Explores an approach for working with database pages in Rust while avoiding unnecessary copies.
• This Month in Redox - April 2026
  • The Redox project reports updates across the kernel, system libraries, drivers, and userspace.

Infrastructure and Tooling

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

• Rust 1.95.0
  • Stabilizes cfg_select!, atomic update/try_update methods, and allocator layout helpers such as Layout::{dangling_ptr, repeat, repeat_packed, extend_packed}.
  • Important for custom-target users: stable rustc no longer accepts JSON target specifications. Building core for custom targets still requires nightly-only features.
• Move std::io pieces toward core::io
  • ErrorKind and RawOsError were moved into core::io, continuing the groundwork for more I/O abstractions in no_std contexts.
• Add -Zsanitize=kernel-hwaddress
  • Adds nightly support for the kernel hardware address sanitizer mode used by Linux's CONFIG_KASAN_SW_TAGS.
• Mitigation enforcement RFC
  • An approved RFC for tracking and enforcing target-wide exploit mitigation options such as stack protector settings.
• build-std: always RFC
  • Proposed Cargo configuration for rebuilding standard library crates, part of the ongoing effort to make build-std usable on stable.

rust-osdev Projects

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

pvh

Maintained by @mkroening

The pvh crate contains definitions for Xen's x86/HVM direct boot ABI (PVH). PVH is commonly used for direct kernel boot in virtual machine managers (VMMs), such as QEMU, and in VMMs using the linux-loader crate, such as Firecracker and Cloud Hypervisor.

The crate allows kernels to be booted via PVH and helps read the data provided via physical addresses. Its structures can also be used in VMMs or bootloaders to create appropriate start info structures when loading a kernel.

The new repository was created this month and is also available on crates.io.

Thanks to @mkroening for creating the project!

acpi

Maintained by @IsaacWoods

The acpi repository contains crates for parsing the ACPI tables – data structures that the firmware of modern computers uses to relay information about the hardware to the OS.

We merged the following changes this month:

• Support multiple tables per test in aml_tester
• Implement Index and Bank fields
• Add support for running the tests from uACPI
• Remove some AML-triggerable panics from library
• Derive Clone, Debug on useful objects
• (minor) Trace the table ID better

Thanks to @martin-hughes 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:

• uefi: make TimerTrigger more pleasant to use
• uefi-raw: Add SimpleTextInputEx protocol
• uefi: Add InputEx protocol

Thanks to @JarlEvanson 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 change:

• Update to v0.11.15 and add missing x86_64-unknown-uefi target

Thanks to @peppergrayxyz 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 PR this month:

• insert NOP after STI

linked-list-allocator

Maintained by @phil-opp and @jamesmunns

The linked-list-allocator crate provides a basic no_std allocator that builds a linked list from freed memory blocks and thus needs no additional data structures. We merged the following PR this month:

• fix(alloc_ref): use renamed dangling

Thanks to @sermuns for their contribution!

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.

willamhou/hypervisor

(Section written by @willamhou)

An ARM64 Type-1 bare-metal hypervisor written in Rust (no_std). It runs at EL2 and manages guest VMs at EL1, targeting the QEMU virt machine. The project boots Linux 6.12.12 to a BusyBox shell with 4 vCPUs, virtio-blk storage, and virtio-net inter-VM networking.

Key features:

• S-EL2 SPMC: Runs as BL32 in TF-A boot chain, replacing Hafnium. Manages multiple Secure Partitions (SPs) at S-EL1 with per-SP Secure Stage-2 page tables.
• FF-A v1.1: Full proxy implementation including DIRECT_REQ/RESP messaging, memory sharing (MEM_SHARE/LEND/DONATE/RETRIEVE/RELINQUISH/RECLAIM), descriptor fragmentation, PARTITION_INFO_GET, notifications, indirect messaging, and CONSOLE_LOG.
• pKVM integration: Coexists with Android pKVM at NS-EL2 — our SPMC at S-EL2, pKVM at NS-EL2. 35/35 ffa_test.ko tests pass, including SP-to-SP DIRECT_REQ relay and SP-to-SP memory sharing through the real SPMD chain.
• Multi-VM: 2 Linux VMs time-sliced with VMID-tagged TLBs and per-VM Stage-2 page tables.
• SMP: Both 4-vCPU-on-1-pCPU (round-robin scheduler) and 4-vCPU-on-4-pCPU (1:1 affinity) modes.
• SP-to-SP: CallStack cycle detection, recursive dispatch, chain preemption, secure virtual interrupt injection via HCR_EL2.VI.
• 34 test suites with ~457 assertions running on QEMU, plus 20/20 BL33 E2E integration tests.

MohammadMuzamil23/Qunix-Operating-System

(Section suggested by JustSmile)

Qunix is a Unix-like hobby operating system written in Rust. It includes a process model, virtual filesystem layer, memory management with COW fork and demand paging, an ELF loader, and a priority-based preemptive scheduler.

The project recently reached userspace and is making progress on POSIX compatibility. Its initial v0.2.0 release adds 70+ userland utilities, including a shell (qsh), along with blocking pipes, a TTY subsystem, and POSIX-style signal delivery.

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 to get in touch is our Zulip chat.

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