Updates in October and November 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 moved to a new apartment mid-October and had lots of work to do there, so I didn’t have the time for creating the October status update post. Therefore, this post lists the changes from both October and November. I’m slowly picking up speed again, but I still have a lot of mails in my backlog. Sorry if you haven’t received an answer yet!

blog_os

The blog itself received only a minor update: Use panic! instead of println! + loop in double fault handler. This fixes an issue where a double fault during cargo xtest leads to an endless loop without any output on the serial port.

We also have other news: We plan to add Experimental Support for Community Translations to the blog. While this imposes additional challenges, it makes the content accessible to people who don’t speak English, so it’s definitely worth trying in my opinion. The first additional language will be Chinese, based on an existing translation by @luojia65. Many thanks also to @TheBegining and @Rustin-Liu for helping with the translation!

bootloader

• Change the way the kernel entry point is called to honor alignment ABI by @GuillaumeDIDIER (published as version 0.8.2)
• Add support for Github Actions
• Remove unnecessary extern C on panic handler to fix not-ffi-safe warning by @cmsd2 (published as version 0.8.3)

bootimage

• Don’t exit with expected exit code when failed to read QEMU exit code

x86_64

• Switch to GitHub Actions for CI
• Use repr C to suppress not-ffi-safe when used with extern handler functions by @cmsd2 (published as version 0.7.6)
• Add slice and slice_mut methods to IDT by @foxcob (published as version 0.7.7)

cargo-xbuild

• Add support for publishing and installing cross compiled crates by @ALSchwalm (published as version 0.5.18)