rOSt, a 64-Bit Rust operating system

rOSt is an experimental 64-bit x86_64 operating system written in Rust. It targets BIOS and UEFI, features a higher-half kernel and custom memory management, and serves as a research and learning project.

Documentation: Wiki.

Contributing: CONTRIBUTING.md.

Structure

The project is divided into multiple folders:

1. src contains the QEMU setup.
2. kernel contains the actual OS kernel, binding everything together.
3. internal_utils contains utility functions, constants and structures that are used throughout the kernel and drivers.
4. drivers contains drivers that add extended functionality that is not in the scope of the kernel core, for example VGA and ATA support.

Requirements

• Rust using the nightly channel
• llvm-tools-preview (installed via rustup component add llvm-tools-preview)
• QEMU

Rust should automatically switch to the nightly channel and install the llvm tools when it detects the rust-toolchain.toml.

How to run

cargo run bios

Or if you want to run an UEFI image:

cargo run uefi

The command will build the kernel and start up a qemu instance, booting the kernel in debug mode.

Architecture

• We want to achieve a Microkernel in the end
• for now x86_64 only

Feature map

Legend: ✔️ - Done 🔨 - In Progress ⭕ - Not Done Yet ❌ - Probably won't be supported

• IO

  • ✔️ Framebuffer output
  • ✔️ Serial output and input (COM1)
  • ✔️ Basic logging macros
  • ⭕ Keyboard input (polling or IRQ-based)
  • ⭕ PS/2 mouse support
  • ⭕ Simple shell
  • ⭕ Pipes and redirection
  • 🔨 Block device abstraction
  • ⭕ VFS layer
  • 🔨 Filesystems
    • 🔨 Tag-Based Entity System (TBES)
    • ⭕ FAT32
    • ⭕ ext2
    • ❌ ext4

• Memory

  • ✔️ Physical frame allocator (2-level bitmap allocator)
  • 🔨 Paging
    • ✔️ Higher-half kernel
    • ⭕ Demand paging
    • ✔️ Identity mapping during boot
  • ✔️ Kernel heap allocator
  • ⭕ Per-process address spaces
  • ⭕ Copy-on-write
  • ⭕ Memory-mapped files
  • ✔️ Guard pages
  • ⭕ Slab allocator
  • ⭕ NUMA awareness
  • ⭕ Huge page support

• Processes

  • 🔨 Preemptive scheduler (timer IRQ driven)
    • ⭕ Round-robin scheduling
    • ⭕ Priority scheduler
  • ⭕ User mode (ring 3)
  • ✔️ Context switching
  • ⭕ ELF loader
  • ⭕ Process isolation
  • ✔️ Threads (kernel + user)
  • ⭕ IPC primitives (message passing, shared memory)
  • ⭕ Signals

• Syscalls

  • ⭕ Syscall entry via syscall/sysret
  • ⭕ Basic POSIX-like API
    • ❌ Full POSIX compliance
  • ⭕ Capability-based syscall model
  • ⭕ Async syscall support
  • ⭕ Stable syscall ABI versioning

• Drivers

  • ✔️ VGA
  • ✔️ Serial (16550 UART)
  • 🔨 PIT/APIC timer
  • 🔨 Keyboard controller
  • ✔️ ATA PIO
  • ⭕ APIC / IOAPIC full support
  • ⭕ HPET timer
  • ⭕ AHCI / NVMe
  • ⭕ PCI bus enumeration
  • ⭕ Network card
  • ⭕ USB (UHCI/EHCI/XHCI)
  • ⭕ ACPI parsing

• Interrupts & CPU

  • ✔️ IDT setup
  • ✔️ TSS with proper privilege stacks
  • 🔨 Exception handlers
  • 🔨 Timer interrupt
  • 🔨 PIC remapping
  • ⭕ FPU/SIMD context switching
  • ⭕ SMP support
  • ⭕ Per-core structures
  • ⭕ Fast syscall path

Troubleshooting

• If the build fails due to unstable features, make sure that you have enabled the nightly channel using rustup default nightly or rustup upgrade

_{Processor Chip Icon by Kalash}