An Actor micro-kernel written in Rust
The traditional language for writing an operating system is C. While C is widely portable, and fairly close to Assembly Language, it has a dangerous semantic model. Rust is a much safer language, which still allows controlled access to "unsafe" mechanisms required for OS development.
Oxide is a memory-safe capability-secure operating system based on the Actor Model of computation. The design of Oxide is based on a very small asynchronous message-passing micro-kernel. The three most important design requirements are:
- Low latency
- High throughput
- Provable safety
You need a nightly Rust compiler. First you need to install the cargo-xbuild and bootimage tools:
cargo install cargo-xbuild bootimage
Then you can build the project by running:
cargo xbuild
To create a bootable disk image, run:
cargo bootimage
This creates a bootable disk image in the target/x86_64-blog_os/debug directory.
You can run the disk image in QEMU through:
cargo xrun
Of course QEMU needs to be installed for this.
You can run QEMU directly like this:
qemu-system-x86_64 -drive format=raw,file=target/x86_64-blog_os/debug/bootimage-blog_os.bin
You can also write the image to an USB stick for booting it on a real machine. On Linux, the command for this is:
dd if=target/x86_64-blog_os/debug/bootimage-blog_os.bin of=/dev/sdX && sync
Where sdX is the device name of your USB stick. Be careful to choose the correct device name, because everything on that device is overwritten.
To run the unit and integration tests, execute cargo xtest.
Licensed under MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)
The foundation for this code-base is Philipp Oppermann's excellent blog Writing an OS in Rust