rustboot

A tiny 32 bit kernel written in Rust.

I was inspired to download Rust and try to do this after seeing zero.rs - a stub that lets Rust programs run almost freestanding.

It paints the screen bright red and then hangs. That's it:

Interesting forks

• jvns/puddle

• pczarn/rustboot

Setup

You need a few things to run rustboot:

1. qemu
2. a cross-compiler for i386
3. nasm
4. Rust's master branch or 0.7 release.

OSX

To set things up on OSX, do this:

Install nasm and qemu from homebrew:

$ brew install nasm
$ brew install qemu

Make sure the brew version of nasm is being used:

$ nasm -v
NASM version 2.11.02 compiled on Apr 14 2014

Install binutils from source.

I personally keep things I manually compile limited to my home directory, so I use the --prefix=/Users/steve option. Put this wherever you want, of course.

$ wget http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/binutils/binutils-2.24.tar.gz
$ tar xf binutils-2.24.tar.gz
$ cd binutils-2.24
$ ./configure --target=i386-elf --disable-werror --prefix=/Users/steve
$ make && make install

To get edge Rust going, grab it from git:

$ git clone https://github.com/mozilla/rust
$ cd rust
$ ./configure --prefix=/Users/steve
$ make && make install

Same thing about the prefix applies.

Then, just make sure that ~/bin is in your PATH, if you're using a prefix.

Running it

To compile, simply

$ make

To run,

$ make run