Operating System development tutorials in Rust on the Raspberry Pi
ℹ️ Introduction
This is a tutorial series for hobby OS developers who are new to ARM's 64 bit
ARMv8-A architecture. The tutorials will give a guided, step-by-step tour of
how to write a monolithic Operating System kernel for an embedded system
from scratch. They cover implementation of common Operating Systems tasks, like
writing to the serial console, setting up virtual memory and handling HW
exceptions. All while leveraging Rust's unique features to provide for safety
and speed.
Cheers, Andre (@andre-richter)
P.S.: In the future, Chinese :cn: versions of the tutorials will be maintained as README.CN.md by @colachg and @readlnh.
? Organization
- Each tutorial contains a stand-alone, bootable
kernelbinary. - Each new tutorial extends the previous one.
- Each tutorial
READMEwill have a shorttl;drsection giving a brief
overview of the additions, and show the source codediffto the previous
tutorial, so that you can conveniently inspect the changes/additions. - Some tutorials have a full-fledged, detailed text in addition to the
tl;dr
section. The long-term plan is that all tutorials get a full text, but for now
this is exclusive to tutorials where I think thattl;dranddiffare not
enough to get the idea. - The code written in these tutorials supports and runs on the Raspberry Pi
3 and the Raspberry Pi 4.- Tutorials 1 till 5 are groundwork code which only makes sense to run in
QEMU. - Starting with tutorial 6, you can load and run the
kernel on Raspberrys and observe output overUART.
- Tutorials 1 till 5 are groundwork code which only makes sense to run in
- Although the Raspberry Pi 3 and 4 are the main target boards, the code is
written in a modular fashion which allows for easy porting to other CPU
architectures and/or boards.- I would really love if someone takes a shot at a RISC-V implementation!
- For editing, I recommend Visual Studio Code with the Rust Language Server
extension. - In addition to the tutorial text, also check out the
make doccommand to
browse the code with HTML goodness.
? Ease of use
This series tries to put a strong focus on user friendliness. Therefore, I made
efforts to eliminate the biggest painpoint in embedded development: Toolchain
hassles.
Users eager to try the code will not be bothered with complicated toolchain
installation/compilation steps. This is achieved by using the standard Rust
toolchain as much as possible, and provide all additional tooling through an
accompanying Docker container. The container will be pulled in automagically
once it is needed. The only requirement is that you have installed Docker for
your distro.
The development setup consists of the following components:
- Compiler, linker and binutils are used from Rust nightly.
- Additional OS Dev tools, like
QEMUorGDB, are provided by this
container.
If you want to know more about docker and peek at the the container used for the
tutorials, please refer to the repository's docker folder.
? Prerequisites
Before you can start, you must install a suitable Rust toolchain:
curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf \