:books: Learn to write an embedded OS in Rust :crab:
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.
Have fun!
Best regards,
Andre (@andre-richter)
P.S.: For other languages, please look out for alternative README files. For example,
README.CN.md
or README.ES.md
. Many thanks to our
translators đ.
kernel
binary.README
will have a short tl;dr
section giving a brief overview of the additions,
and show the source code diff
to the previous tutorial, so that you can conveniently inspect the
changes/additions.
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 that tl;dr
and diff
are not enough to get the idea.QEMU
.UART
.make doc
command in each tutorial. It lets
you browse the extensively documented code in a convenient way.make doc
The tutorials are primarily targeted at Linux-based distributions. Most stuff will also work on macOS, but this is only experimental.
(Linux only) Ensure your user account is in the docker group.
Prepare the Rust
toolchain. Most of it will be handled on first use through the
rust-toolchain.toml file. What's left for us to do is:
If you already have a version of Rust installed:
cargo install cargo-binutils rustfilt
If you need to install Rust from scratch:
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh
source $HOME/.cargo/env
cargo install cargo-binutils rustfilt
In case you use Visual Studio Code
, I strongly recommend installing the Rust Analyzer extension.
(macOS only) Install a few Ruby
gems.
This was last tested by the author with Ruby version 3.0.2
on macOS Monterey
. If you are using
rbenv
, the respective .ruby-version
file is already in place. If you never heard of rbenv
,
try using this little guide.
Run this in the repository root folder:
bundle config set --local path '.vendor/bundle'
bundle config set --local without 'development'
bundle install
This series tries to put a strong focus on user friendliness. Therefore, efforts were made to
eliminate the biggest painpoint in embedded development as much as possible: Toolchain hassle
.
Rust itself is already helping a lot in that regard, because it has built-in support for
cross-compilation. All that we need for cross-compiling from an x86
host to the Raspberry Pi's
AArch64
architecture will be automatically installed by rustup
. However, besides the Rust
compiler, we will use some more tools. Among others:
QEMU
to emulate our kernel on the host system.Minipush
to load a kernel onto the Raspberry Pi on-demand over UART
.OpenOCD
and GDB
for debugging on the target.There is a lot that can go wrong while installing and/or compiling the correct version of each tool on your host machine. For example, your distribution might not provide the latest version that is needed. Or you are missing some hard-to-get dependencies for the compilation of one of these tools.
This is why we will make use of Docker whenever possible. We are providing an accompanying container that has all the needed tools or dependencies pre-installed, and it gets pulled in automagically once it is needed. If you want to know more about Docker and peek at the provided container, please refer to the repository's docker folder.
Since the kernel developed in the tutorials runs on the real hardware, it is highly recommended to get a USB serial cable to get the full experience.
CP2102
chip.GND
and GPIO pins 14/15
as shown below.chainloader
is developed, which will be the
last file you need to manually copy on the SD card for a while. It will enable you to load the
tutorial kernels during boot on demand over UART
.The original version of the tutorials started out as a fork of Zoltan
Baldaszti's awesome tutorials on bare metal programming on
RPi3 in C
. Thanks for giving me a head start!
Licensed under either of
at your option.
Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.