Techno-coder / example_os

A heavily commented OS in Rust for reference purposes

example_os

A heavily commented OS in Rust for reference purposes (documentation in progress).
Check out the companion site here: Tutorials

This OS is a hard fork of my private OS that I'm also working on. No more features will be added to this OS as it is for reference purposes only.
Huge thanks to Phil-opp and the OSDev wiki

License

Everything in this repository is under the MIT license, excluding the _posts and assets folder (which contains data for the companion website), which is copyrighted.

Features

• Preemptive Multitasking (including system calls)
• System Calls (well, one of them)
• Primitive filesystem (Tar archive ram disk)
• Stack traces (with kernel symbols)
• Huge page support
• Huge frame allocation
• Keyboard driver
• Kernel shell (with tab completion)

Prerequisites

You can find most of the prerequisites needed in the CMakeLists.txt files located in the root and in kernel folder.

Build requirements:

• NASM Assembler
• Binutils
• nm (Symbol table displayer)
• Rust
• Cargo
• Xargo
• LLVM linker
• tar (for creating the boot disk)
• grub-mkrescue (to generate the .iso file)
• CMake (if you wish to compile with CMake)

Execution requirements:

• QEMU
• Bochs

A bochsrc file is located in the root.

Build instructions

Once you have installed the prerequisites, you can either compile everything manually or use CMake.

CMake

Change XARGO_TOOL in the kernel CMake file from xargo-m to xargo. The -m suffix is to avoid Intellij-Rust from using Xargo to run tests.
Change OBJECT_COPY_TOOL from gobjcopy to objcopy or whatever the objcopy tool is aliased to.

Finally, run this command: cmake --build cmake-build-debug --target x86_64-example_os.iso
The .iso file will be located in the cmake-build-debug folder

CLion

Import the project and then build the .iso target after making the changes in the CMake section.

Manually

1. Use NASM to compile all the files in kernel/assembly with the command
   nasm -felf64 -w-number-overflow -Ikernel/assembly
2. Use Xargo to compile the Rust binary with the command (execute in the kernel folder)
   RUST_FLAGS=-Cforce-frame-pointers=yes RUST_TARGET_PATH=`pwd` xargo build --target x86_64-example_os
   The RUST_TARGET_PATH is needed to allow xargo to locate the target specification.
3. Link all the files together
   ld.lld --gc-sections -Tlinker.ld <Assembly object files> <Generated Rust file>
   The Rust file is located in kernel/target/x86_64-example_os/debug/libkernel.a
4. Create a boot_disk folder, and a kernel folder inside of that
5. Use nm against the linked binary and pipe it to a file symbols.table.
   Copy this file into the boot_disk/kernel folder.
6. Tar the boot_disk folder into boot_disk.tar
7. Create a iso_files folder, and a boot folder inside of that, and a grub folder inside of that
8. Copy the grub.cfg file into iso_files/boot/grub
9. Copy the boot_disk.tar into iso_files/boot
10. Create the .iso with the command
    grub-mkrescue -o <ISO file> iso_files

Execution

Bochs

Just run bochs in the root directory. You may need to change the path to the iso file in the bochsrc.

QEMU

Run the command
qemu-system-x86_64 -cdrom x86_64-example_os.iso -monitor stdio -d int -no-reboot -no-shutdown