+++ title = "Set Up Rust" date = "2015-09-02" updated = "2016-05-29" aliases = [ "/2015/09/02/setup-rust/", "/setup-rust.html", "/rust-os/setup-rust.html", ] +++

In the previous posts we created a [minimal Multiboot kernel][multiboot post] and [switched to Long Mode][long mode post]. Now we can finally switch to [Rust] code. Rust is a high-level language without runtime. It allows us to not link the standard library and write bare metal code. Unfortunately the setup is not quite hassle-free yet.

[multiboot post]: {{% relref "01-multiboot-kernel.md" %}} [long mode post]: {{% relref "02-entering-longmode.md" %}} [Rust]: https://www.rust-lang.org/

This blog post tries to set up Rust step-by-step and point out the different problems. If you have any questions, problems, or suggestions please file an issue or create a comment at the bottom. The code from this post is in a Github repository, too.

Installing Rust

We need a nightly compiler, as we will use many unstable features. To manage Rust installations I highly recommend rustup. It allows you to install nightly, beta, and stable compilers side-by-side and makes it easy to update them. To use a nightly compiler for the current directory, you can run rustup override add nightly.

The code from this post (and all following) is automatically tested every day and should always work for the newest nightly. If it doesn't, please file an issue.

Creating a Cargo project

Cargo is Rust excellent package manager. Normally you would call cargo new when you want to create a new project folder. We can't use it because our folder already exists, so we need to do it manually. Fortunately we only need to add a cargo configuration file named Cargo.toml:

[package]
name = "blog_os"
version = "0.1.0"
authors = ["Philipp Oppermann <dev@phil-opp.com>"]

[lib]
crate-type = ["staticlib"]

The package section contains required project metadata such as the semantic crate version. The lib section specifies that we want to build a static library, i.e. a library that contains all of its dependencies. This is required to link the Rust project with our kernel.

Now we place our root source file in src/lib.rs:

#![feature(lang_items)]
#![no_std]

#[no_mangle]
pub extern fn rust_main() {}

#[lang = "eh_personality"] extern fn eh_personality() {}
#[lang = "panic_fmt"] #[no_mangle] pub extern fn panic_fmt() -> ! {loop{}}

Let's break it down:

• #! defines an attribute of the current module. Since we are at the root module, they apply to the crate itself.
• The feature attribute is used to allow the specified feature-gated attributes in this crate. You can't do that in a stable/beta compiler, so this is one reason we need a Rust nighly.
• The no_std attribute prevents the automatic linking of the standard library. We can't use std because it relies on operating system features like files, system calls, and various device drivers. Remember that currently the only “feature” of our OS is printing OKAY :).
• A # without a ! afterwards defines an attribute for the following item (a function in our case).
• The no_mangle attribute disables the automatic name mangling that Rust uses to get unique function names. We want to do a call rust_main from our assembly code, so this function name must stay as it is.
• We mark our main function as extern to make it compatible to the standard C calling convention.
• The lang attribute defines a Rust language item.
• The eh_personality function is used for Rust's unwinding on panic!. We can leave it empty since we don't have any unwinding support in our OS yet.
• The panic_fmt function is the entry point on panic. Right now we can't do anything useful, so we just make sure that it doesn't return (required by the ! return type).

Building Rust

We can now build it using cargo build. To make sure that we build it for the x86_64 architecture and that we use a Linux compatible format, we pass an explicit target triple:

cargo build --target=x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu

This command creates a static library at target/x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/debug/libblog_os.a, which can be linked with our assembly kernel.

(If you're getting an error about a missing core crate, you're probably using a host system with a different target triple. You can easily resolve this by executing rustup target add x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu. This command will install the pre-compiled standard libraries for this target, including the missing core crate.)

To build and link the rust library on make, we extend our Makefile(full file):

# ...
target ?= $(arch)-unknown-linux-gnu
rust_os := target/$(target)/debug/libblog_os.a
# ...
$(kernel): cargo $(rust_os) $(assembly_object_files) $(linker_script)
	@ld -n -T $(linker_script) -o $(kernel) \
		$(assembly_object_files) $(rust_os)

cargo:
       @cargo build --target $(target)

We added a new cargo target that just executes cargo build and modified the $(kernel) target to link the created static lib .

But now cargo build is executed on every make, even if no source file was changed. And the ISO is recreated on every make iso/make run, too. We could try to avoid this by adding dependencies on all rust source and cargo configuration files to the cargo target, but the ISO creation takes only half a second on my machine and most of the time we will have changed a Rust file when we run make. So we keep it simple for now and let cargo do the bookkeeping of changed files (it does it anyway).

Calling Rust

Now we can call the main method in long_mode_start:

bits 64
long_mode_start:
    ; call the rust main
    extern rust_main     ; new
    call rust_main       ; new

    ; print `OKAY` to screen
    mov rax, 0x2f592f412f4b2f4f
    mov qword [0xb8000], rax
    hlt

By defining rust_main as extern we tell nasm that the function is defined in another file. As the linker takes care of linking them together, we'll get a linker error if we have a typo in the name or forget to mark the rust function as pub extern.

If we've done everything right, we should still see the green OKAY when executing make run. That means that we successfully called the Rust function and returned back to assembly.

Fixing Linker Errors

Now we can try some Rust code:

pub extern fn rust_main() {
    let x = ["Hello", "World", "!"];
    let y = x;
}

When we test it using make run, it fails with undefined reference to 'memcpy'. The memcpy function is one of the basic functions of the C library (libc). Usually the libc crate is linked to every Rust program together with the standard library, but we opted out through #![no_std]. We could try to fix this by adding the libc crate as extern crate. But libc is just a wrapper for the system libc, for example glibc on Linux, so this won't work for us. Instead we need to recreate the basic libc functions such as memcpy, memmove, memset, and memcmp in Rust.

rlibc

Fortunately there already is a crate for that: rlibc. When we look at its source code we see that it contains no magic, just some raw pointer operations in a while loop. To add rlibc as a dependency we just need to add two lines to the Cargo.toml:

...
[dependencies]
rlibc = "0.1.4"

and an extern crate definition in our src/lib.rs:

...
extern crate rlibc;

#[no_mangle]
pub extern fn rust_main() {
...

Now make run doesn't complain about memcpy anymore. Instead it will show a pile of new errors:

target/debug/libblog_os.a(core-35017696.0.o):
    In function `ops::f32.Rem::rem::hfcbbcbe5711a6e6emxm':
    core.0.rs:(.text._ZN3ops7f32.Rem3rem20hfcbbcbe5711a6e6emxmE+0x1):
    undefined reference to `fmodf'
target/debug/libblog_os.a(core-35017696.0.o):
    In function `ops::f64.Rem::rem::hbf225030671c7a35Txm':
    core.0.rs:(.text._ZN3ops7f64.Rem3rem20hbf225030671c7a35TxmE+0x1):
    undefined reference to `fmod'
...

--gc-sections

The new errors are linker errors about missing fmod and fmodf functions. These functions are used for the modulo operation (%) on floating point numbers in libcore. The core library is added implicitly when using #![no_std] and provides basic standard library features like Option or Iterator. According to the documentation it is “dependency-free”. But it actually has some dependencies, for example on fmod and fmodf.

So how do we fix this problem? We don't use any floating point operations, so we could just provide our own implementations of fmod and fmodf that just do a loop{}. But there's a better way that doesn't fail silently when we use float modulo some day: We tell the linker to remove unused sections. That's generally a good idea as it reduces kernel size. And we don't have any references to fmod and fmodf anymore until we use floating point modulo. The magic linker flag is --gc-sections, which stands for “garbage collect sections”. Let's add it to the $(kernel) target in our Makefile:

$(kernel): cargo $(rust_os) $(assembly_object_files) $(linker_script)
	@ld -n --gc-sections -T $(linker_script) -o $(kernel) \
		$(assembly_object_files) $(rust_os)

Now we can do a make run again and… it doesn't boot anymore:

GRUB error: no multiboot header found.

What happened? Well, the linker removed unused sections. And since we don't use the Multiboot section anywhere, ld removes it, too. So we need to tell the linker explicitely that it should keep this section. The KEEP command does exactly that, so we add it to the linker script (linker.ld):

.boot :
{
    /* ensure that the multiboot header is at the beginning */
    KEEP(*(.multiboot_header))
}

Now everything should work again (the green OKAY). But there is another linking issue, which is triggered by some other example code.

panic = "abort"

The following snippet still fails:

    ...
    let test = (0..3).flat_map(|x| 0..x).zip(0..);

The error is a linker error again (hence the ugly error message):

target/debug/libblog_os.a(blog_os.0.o):
    In function `blog_os::iter::Iterator::zip<core::iter::FlatMap<
        core::ops::Range<i32>, core::ops::Range<i32>, closure>,
        core::ops::RangeFrom<i32>>':
    /home/.../src/libcore/iter.rs:654:
    undefined reference to `_Unwind_Resume'

So the linker can't find a function named _Unwind_Resume that is referenced in iter.rs:654 in libcore. This reference is not really there at line 654 of libcore's iter.rs. Instead, it is a compiler inserted landing pad, which is used for panic handling.

By default, the destructors of all stack variables are run when a panic occurs. This is called unwinding and allows parent threads to recover from panics. However, it requires a platform specific gcc library, which isn't available in our kernel.

Fortunately, Rust allows us to disable unwinding. We just need to add some entries in our Cargo.toml:

# The development profile, used for `cargo build`.
[profile.dev]
panic = "abort"

# The release profile, used for `cargo build --release`.
[profile.release]
panic = "abort"

These profile sections specify options for cargo build and cargo release. By setting the panic option to abort, we disable all unwinding in our kernel.

However, there are still references to _Unwind_Resume in the precompiled standard libraries. This might lead to linker errors when we use specific parts of libcore. To avoid this, we create a dummy _Unwind_Resume function that loops indefinitely¹ :

// in src/lib.rs

#[allow(non_snake_case)]
#[no_mangle]
pub extern "C" fn _Unwind_Resume() -> ! {
    loop {}
}

Now we fixed all linking issues and our kernel builds again. But instead of displaying Hello World, it constantly reboots itself when we start it.

Debugging the Boot Loop

Such a boot loop is most likely caused by some CPU exception. When these exceptions aren't handled, a Triple Fault occurs and the processor resets itself. We can look at generated CPU interrupts/exceptions using QEMU:

> qemu-system-x86_64 -d int -no-reboot -cdrom build/os-x86_64.iso
SMM: enter
...
SMM: after RSM
...
check_exception old: 0xffffffff new 0x6
     0: v=06 e=0000 i=0 cpl=0 IP=0008:000000000010018a pc=000000000010018a
     SP=0010:0000000000102f70 env->regs[R_EAX]=0000000080010010
...
check_exception old: 0xffffffff new 0xd
     1: v=0d e=0062 i=0 cpl=0 IP=0008:000000000010018a pc=000000000010018a
     SP=0010:0000000000102f70 env->regs[R_EAX]=0000000080010010
...
check_exception old: 0xd new 0xd
     2: v=08 e=0000 i=0 cpl=0 IP=0008:000000000010018a pc=000000000010018a
     SP=0010:0000000000102f70 env->regs[R_EAX]=0000000080010010
...
check_exception old: 0x8 new 0xd

Let me first explain the QEMU arguments: The -d int logs CPU interrupts to the console and the -no-reboot flag closes QEMU instead of constant rebooting. But what does the cryptical output mean? I already omitted most of it as we don't need it here. Let's break down the rest:

• The SMM: enter and SMM: after RSM blocks are created before our OS boots, so we just ignore them.
• The check_exception old: 0xffffffff new 0x6 block is the interesting one. It says: “a new CPU exception with number 0x6 occurred“.
• The last blocks indicate further exceptions. They were thrown because we didn't handle the 0x6 exception, so we're going to ignore them, too.

So let's look at the first exception: old:0xffffffff means that the CPU wasn't handling an interrupt when the exception occurred. The new exception has number 0x6. By looking at an exception table we learn that 0x6 indicates a Invalid Opcode fault. So the lastly executed instruction was invalid. The register dump tells us that the current instruction was 0x10018a (through IP (instruction pointer) or pc (program counter)). Therefore the instruction at 0x10018a seems to be invalid. We can look at it using objdump:

> objdump -D build/kernel-x86_64.bin | grep "10018a:"
10018a:	0f 10 05 c7 01 00 00 	movups 0x1c7(%rip),%xmm0 ...

Through objdump -D we disassemble our whole kernel and grep picks the relevant line. The instruction at 0x10018a seems to be a valid movups instruction. It's a SSE instruction that moves 128 bit between memory and SSE-registers (e.g. xmm0). But why the Invalid Opcode exception? The answer is hidden behind the movups documentation: The section Protected Mode Exceptions lists the conditions for the various exceptions. The short code of the Invalid Opcode is #UD. An #UD exception occurs:

If an unmasked SIMD floating-point exception and OSXMMEXCPT in CR4 is 0. If EM in CR0 is set. If OSFXSR in CR4 is 0. If CPUID feature flag SSE is 0.

The rough translation of this cryptic definition is: If SSE isn't enabled. So apparently Rust uses SSE instructions by default and we didn't enable SSE before. To fix this, we can either disable SSE instructions in the compiler or enable SSE in our kernel. We do the latter, as it's easier.

Enabling SSE

To enable SSE, assembly code is needed again. We want to add a function that tests if SSE is available and enables it then. Else we want to print an error message.

We add it to the boot.asm file:

; Check for SSE and enable it. If it's not supported throw error "a".
set_up_SSE:
    ; check for SSE
    mov eax, 0x1
    cpuid
    test edx, 1<<25
    jz .no_SSE

    ; enable SSE
    mov eax, cr0
    and ax, 0xFFFB      ; clear coprocessor emulation CR0.EM
    or ax, 0x2          ; set coprocessor monitoring  CR0.MP
    mov cr0, eax
    mov eax, cr4
    or ax, 3 << 9       ; set CR4.OSFXSR and CR4.OSXMMEXCPT at the same time
    mov cr4, eax

    ret
.no_SSE:
    mov al, "a"
    jmp error

The code is from the great OSDev Wiki again. Notice that it sets/unsets exactly the bits that can cause the Invalid Opcode exception.

When we insert a call set_up_SSE somewhere in the start function (for example after call enable_paging), our Rust code will finally work.

“OS returned!”

Now that we're editing assembly anyway, we should change the OKAY message to something more meaningful. My suggestion is a red OS returned!:

...
call rust_main

.os_returned:
    ; rust main returned, print `OS returned!`
    mov rax, 0x4f724f204f534f4f
    mov [0xb8000], rax
    mov rax, 0x4f724f754f744f65
    mov [0xb8008], rax
    mov rax, 0x4f214f644f654f6e
    mov [0xb8010], rax
    hlt

Ok, that's enough assembly for now. Let's switch back to Rust.

Hello World!

Finally, it's time for a Hello World! from Rust:

pub extern fn rust_main() {
    // ATTENTION: we have a very small stack and no guard page

    let hello = b"Hello World!";
    let color_byte = 0x1f; // white foreground, blue background

    let mut hello_colored = [color_byte; 24];
    for (i, char_byte) in hello.into_iter().enumerate() {
        hello_colored[i*2] = *char_byte;
    }

    // write `Hello World!` to the center of the VGA text buffer
    let buffer_ptr = (0xb8000 + 1988) as *mut _;
    unsafe { *buffer_ptr = hello_colored };

    loop{}
}

Some notes:

• The b prefix creates a byte string, which is just an array of u8
• enumerate is an Iterator method that adds the current index i to elements
• buffer_ptr is a raw pointer that points to the center of the VGA text buffer
• Rust doesn't know the VGA buffer and thus can't guarantee that writing to the buffer_ptr is safe (it could point to important data). So we need to tell Rust that we know what we are doing by using an unsafe block.

Stack Overflows

Since we still use the small 64 byte [stack from the last post], we must be careful not to [overflow] it. Normally, Rust tries to avoid stack overflows through guard pages: The page below the stack isn't mapped and such a stack overflow triggers a page fault (instead of silently overwriting random memory). But we can't unmap the page below our stack right now since we currently use only a single big page. Fortunately the stack is located just above the page tables. So some important page table entry would probably get overwritten on stack overflow and then a page fault occurs, too.

[stack from the last post]: {{% relref "02-entering-longmode.md#creating-a-stack" %}} [overflow]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_overflow

What's next?

Until now we write magic bits to some memory location when we want to print something to screen. In the [next post] we create a abstraction for the VGA text buffer that allows us to print strings in different colors and provides a simple interface.

[next post]: {{% relref "04-printing-to-screen.md" %}}