Updates in September 2019

This post gives an overview of the recent updates to the Writing an OS in Rust blog and the used libraries and tools.

I finished my master thesis and got my degree this month, so I only had limited time for my open source work. I still managed to perform a few minor updates, including code simplications for the Paging Implementation post and the evaluation of GitHub Actions as a CI service.

blog_os

• Improve Paging Implementation Post: Improves and simplifies the code in multiple places
• Use GitHub Actions to build and deploy blog
• Set up GitHub Actions for post-XX branches: post-01, post-02, post-04
• Update to bootloader 0.8.0: Considerably reduces compile times
• Update to Zola 0.9.0: Updates the used static site generator to the latest version

cargo-xbuild

• Print a warning when building for the host target

bootloader

• Add a Cargo Feature for Enabling SSE

uart_16550

• Update to x86_64 0.7.3 and bitflags
• Document how serial port is configured by default by @edigaryev

x86_64

No updates were merged in September. However, I’m planning some breaking changes for the crate, namely:

• Replace ux dependency with custom wrapper structs to reduce compile times
• Add new UnsafePhysFrame type and use it in Mapper::map_to
• Make Mapper trait object safe by adding Self: Sized bounds on generic functions