RustOS

An Operating System Kernel written in Rust.

Docs

Documented at RustOS Blog

Setup

Nightly Rust Compiler

Use the nightly rust compiler with rustup to opt-in to various experimental features.

rustup override set nightly

QEMU and VcXsrv

QEMU

QEMU is an open-source machine emulator that lets you run virtual machines on your computer or emulate different hardware. We are using QEMU to quickly run instances of our OS kernel. Follow these instructions to install.

sudo apt-get install qemu-system

VcXsrv

To properly build this project on WSL an X server is needed on the host Windows machine.

An X server is a GUI environment for Unix-based systems. When running QEMU on a virtual machine, it needs to display that GUI somewhere. Since WSL does not natively support GUI applications, an external X server is needed to render the graphical output from the Linux environment.

Install an X server e.g. VcXsrv on Windows and set the DISPLAY variable in your WSL terminal:

export DISPLAY=localhost:0.0

Install bootimage crate

Read why the bootimage crate is needed.

cargo install bootimage
rustup component add llvm-tools-preview
cargo bootimage

Finally, build and run OS in QEMU

cargo run