rust-on-riscv-starter-kit 🦀🚀

A minimal bare-metal Rust "Hello, RISC-V" starter project.

This project runs on the 32-bit RISC-V virt machine in QEMU and prints Hello, RISC-V! to the UART console. No std, no external crates, no magic - just you, Rust, and the hardware.

🛠 Requirements

• Rust toolchain (rustup) with the RISC-V target:

  rustup target add riscv32imac-unknown-none-elf
  

• QEMU with RISC-V support:

  sudo apt install qemu-system-misc
  

▶️ Running the Code

1. Clone the repository:

   git clone https://github.com/ddrcode/rust-on-riscv-starter-kit
   cd rust-on-riscv-starter-kit
   

2. Build the binary:

   cargo build --release
   

3. Run it in QEMU:

   qemu-system-riscv32 -machine virt -nographic -bios none -kernel target/riscv32imac-unknown-none-elf/release/hello-riscv
   

You should see:

Hello, RISC-V!

🧠 What’s Inside

• #![no_std], #![no_main]
• Direct MMIO write to UART
• Custom panic handler
• Manual linker script (linker.ld)
• No runtime, no external dependencies

📚 Why This Exists

To give you a clean and minimal starting point for:

• Learning how Rust works without an OS
• Exploring RISC-V memory-mapped I/O
• Building your own microkernel or embedded project

🔒 Safety Note

This project uses unsafe — but in a minimal, contained way to talk to hardware. The goal is to show how Rust can own bare-metal safely, step by step.

🧩 Next Ideas

Want to go further? Try:

• Moving to user mode + ecall
• Adding interrupt handling
• Printing from panic info
• Porting to a real RISC-V board

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Made with ❤️ and panic() by @ddrcode