Updates in December 2019 (#712)

blog/content/status-update/2020-01-07.md

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+title = "Updates in December 2019"
+date = 2020-01-07
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+
+Happy New Year!
+
+This post gives an overview of the recent updates to the _Writing an OS in Rust_ blog and the corresponding libraries and tools.
+
+## `blog_os`
+
+The repository of the _Writing an OS in Rust_ blog received the following updates:
+
+- Update `x86_64` dependency to version 0.8.1. This included the [dependency update](https://github.com/phil-opp/blog_os/pull/701) itself, an [update of the frame allocation code](https://github.com/phil-opp/blog_os/pull/703), and an [update of the blog](https://github.com/phil-opp/blog_os/pull/704).
+- [License the `blog/content` folder under CC BY-NC](https://github.com/phil-opp/blog_os/pull/705)
+- [Reword sentence in first post](https://github.com/phil-opp/blog_os/pull/709) by [@pamolloy](https://github.com/pamolloy)
+
+Further, we're still working on adding [Experimental Support for Community Translations](https://github.com/phil-opp/blog_os/pull/692) to the blog, starting with [Simplified Chinese](https://github.com/phil-opp/blog_os/pull/694) and [Traditional Chinese](https://github.com/phil-opp/blog_os/pull/699). Any help is appreciated!
+
+## `bootloader`
+
+There were no updates to the bootloader this month.
+
+I'm currently working on rewriting the 16-bit/32-bit stages in Rust and making the bootloader more modular in the process. This should make it much easier to add support for UEFI and GRUB booting later.
+
+## `bootimage`
+
+There were no updates to the `bootimage` tool this month.
+
+## `x86_64`
+
+We landed a number of breaking changes this month:
+
+- [Replace `ux` dependency with custom wrapper structs](https://github.com/rust-osdev/x86_64/pull/91)
+- [Add new UnusedPhysFrame type and use it in Mapper::map_to](https://github.com/rust-osdev/x86_64/pull/89)
+- [Make Mapper trait object safe by adding `Self: Sized` bounds on generic functions](https://github.com/rust-osdev/x86_64/pull/84)
+- [Rename divide_by_zero field of IDT to divide_error](https://github.com/rust-osdev/x86_64/pull/108)
+- [Introduce new diverging handler functions for exceptions classified as "abort"](https://github.com/rust-osdev/x86_64/pull/109)
+
+These changes were released an version 0.8.0. Unfortunately, there was a missing re-export for the new `UnusedPhysFrame` type. We fixed it in [#110](https://github.com/rust-osdev/x86_64/pull/110) and released the fix as version 0.8.1.
+
+There was one more addition to the `x86_64` crate afterwards:
+
+- [Add support for cr4 control register (with complete documentation)](https://github.com/rust-osdev/x86_64/pull/111) by [@KarimAllah](https://github.com/KarimAllah) (released as version 0.8.2).
+
+There were also a few changes related to continuous integration:
+
+- [Remove bors from this repo](https://github.com/rust-osdev/x86_64/pull/103)
+- [Run 'push' builds only for master branch](https://github.com/rust-osdev/x86_64/pull/104)
+- [Remove Travis CI and Azure Pipelines scripts](https://github.com/rust-osdev/x86_64/pull/105)
+- [Add caching of cargo crates to GitHub Actions CI](https://github.com/rust-osdev/x86_64/pull/100)
+
+## `cargo-xbuild`
+
+The `cargo-xbuild` crate, which cross-compiles the sysroot, received the following updates this month:
+
+- [Add `--quiet` flag that suppresses "waiting for file lock" message](https://github.com/rust-osdev/cargo-xbuild/pull/43) by [@Nils-TUD](https://github.com/Nils-TUD) (published as version 0.5.19)
+- [Fix wrong feature name for memcpy=false](https://github.com/rust-osdev/cargo-xbuild/pull/50) (released as version 0.5.20)