RostOS is an operating system written in Rust, a relatively new systems programming language. Phillip Oppermanns excellent tutorial series "Writing an OS in Rust" helped me grasp the fundamentals of low-level programming and served as a perfect starting point for the Project. From there on many features were added to reach its current state.
Right now the Kernel's features include the following:
- It boots on many systems running the x86_64 architecture.
- It can display text using the legacy VGA buffer.
- It reads PS/2 keyboard input.
- It can start userspace applications from ELF-files on a ramdisk.
- The ramdisk has its own format RostFS to save files.
- Multiple processes can be run at the same time using a simple scheduler.
To make use of these features, there are system calls which are abstracted away in a small library. Some example programs have been written, including a simple shell and pong.
DISCLAIMER: Only works reliably on Linux.
To begin, you first need to download the language itself. Because an OS requires certain unstable features, a nightly version of the Rust toolchain has to be installed. This can be done using rustup, the official rust toolchain installation program. Make sure that the ~/.cargo/bin is added to $PATH.
To run the OS you need some sort of virtual machine. To use the automatic build scripts, the qemu-system-x86_64 binary has to be present in $PATH, which can be downloaded from www.qemu.org or preferably installed with your distribution's package manager.
Using the automatic build scripts below also requires Python 3 to be installed.
Once these prerequisites are available, you can automatically install all additional dependencies by running python rost.py install. If the install script works, you can then build the OS using python rost.py build and then python rost.py run to run it.
The build command will automatically build any rust projects found in the programs folder and include them in the OS' bin directory.
To write your own programs you can take a look at the pong program. If you copy it, delete its logic and change its name in Cargo.toml you'll have a nice template.