decagondev / simple-os

A freestanding Rust binary upon which OS abstractions can be built on top of.

Simple OS

A freestanding Rust binary upon which OS abstractions can be built on top of.

Initial Setup

1. Make sure that you're running the nightly version of the Rust compiler. If you're unsure if you have rustup installed or not, you can install it from here. Once that's done, run rustup toolchain install nightly to install the nightly toolchain, then switch to it by running rustup default nightly.
2. Fork the repo, then clone it onto your local machine.
3. Download and install QEMU, which is the virtual environment we'll be running our OS in (you may need to add it to your path). You can check that QEMU was correctly installed by running qemu-system-x86_64 and making sure an empty window QEMU window pops up.
4. cd into the root of the simple-os project.
5. We'll need to add Rust's core and compiler_builtins libraries locally. Do this by running rustup component add rust-src.
6. We'll need to install some additional prerequisites through cargo, namely the bootimage and llvm-tools-preview dependencies. You can add these by running cargo install bootimage and rustup component add llvm-tools-preview.
7. Run cargo build to see if everything compiles without issue.
8. Run cargo run. If everything is working correctly, a QEMU window should pop up with "Hello World!" printed inside of it.
9. Run cargo test. The output should include, among other things, five passing tests that look like the following:

simple_os::vga_buffer::test_println_simple...   [ok]
simple_os::vga_buffer::test_println_many...   [ok]
simple_os::vga_buffer::test_println_output...   [ok]
simple_os::vga_buffer::test_println...   [ok]
should_panic::should_fail...   [ok]

If you see these statements in your cargo test output, then everything worked, and you should be good to go! If you see something different, reach out and let me know so we can look into it.