Building an Operating System In Rust Part 1

Building an operating system is a project I have had my eyes set on ever since I discovered free will in the realm of programming. Years ago, I did a reasonable amount of research, paying extra attention to the subject during my computer science degree and I was able to understand Operating System Theory and how it works from first principles but I never really got around to building one. I had only flimsy reasons for not embarking on it like "why build one when there are tons of working ones out there? The theoretical knowledge is enough" . More recently, I am ignoring the need to not re-invent the wheel for the joy of programming. So if you are interested in also rebuilding stuff because you can, join me on this series as I document how I am going to be building kluster. kluster is in its infancy and the direction is not clear but the one certain thing is that I will be building it entirely in Rust, save some assembly instructions and a linker script and I will be explaining every single line of code along the way. It will also be designed to target the raspberrypi 4 & 5, on qemu and on real hardware respectively. This is an opportunity for anyone who wants to see how Rust works at the lowest of levels to hop on and join the ride. Note that this series will be your biggest lesson on delayed gratification because we will write a lot of code before we even get to see anything meaningful on screen but I will foreshadow what you can get by the end of part 3 if you are patient enough: {{ image(src="/images/os-part3-result.png", alt="Part 3 Results OS Dev") }} You can also clone the source code for part 1 from Github and follow along. Project Setup First things first, let us setup the foundation of the project. I'll be straight with you, I love Rust and I enjoy using the Rust ecosystem in its entirety so I will stay true to that and use it as obsessively as any true Rustacean; I won't hold back. Without doubt, all the dependencies we need are freely available as long as