bootproof

A hobby x86_64 operating system written in Rust.

The above screenshot from commit 538dfea (July 18th, 2020) demonstrates bootproof's Unicode support, PSF font loader, and generic support for graphics-based TTYs and terminals.

Installation

bootproof runs on x86_64 and expects to be loaded by UEFI. You can either boot it using an emulator or on your own computer.

Building

You'll need to the Rust nightly toolchain installed because bootproof relies heavily on Rust nightly features (most of which are directly necessary for OS development).

You'll also need the cargo-xbuild crate installed so that you can compile for the x86_64-unknown-uefi target.

Building bootproof is pretty straightforward:

cargo xbuild --target x86_64-unknown-uefi

You can add the --release flag for a release-profile build.

This will produce an executable, target/x86_64-unknown-efi/{profile}/bootproof.efi.

Running

With QEMU

You will need QEMU, and OVMF, which provides a UEFI implementation for QEMU. On Debian derivatives, you can install these dependencies with:

apt install qemu-system-x86 ovmf

After you have built the crate with cargo xbuild, you can use ./run.sh $profile to run QEMU with some good presets. $profile may be either debug or release, depending on which you built. If you don't specify, it defaults to debug, just like cargo.

The VM's serial port will be mapped to stdio, which you can use to interact with the OS.

With real hardware

I would strongly recommend against doing this.

Copy bootproof.efi to your system EFI partition in the EFI folder. You may put it wherever you'd like and select it while booting. Alternatively, you can name it /EFI/Boot/BootX64.efi, and it will be loaded automatically, instead of your regular bootloader or OS.

You do not need a bootloader to run bootproof. The UEFI is all you need.

Goals

1. Have fun. Ultimately, I'm doing this because I want to. Operating system development can be very difficult and tedious at times, but if I've turned this project into work, I've failed.

2. Gain experience, in particular with Rust, large-scale projects, and low-level programming in general. I should always be learning and becoming a better programmer.

3. Show off. I want to demonstrate my skills as a programmer, both to employers and to other programmers in general (because at least in my opinion, writing your own operating system gives you some serious cred!)

4. Make something I'd want to use. I should always be working towards an operating system that directly addresses my use cases and supports my hardware, so that if I ever managed to get far enough along, I'd actually want to use the OS that I ended up making.

Philosophy

1. Simplicity. Getting a lot of stuff done in a simple way is better than getting very little done in an ideal way, especially with a scope as large as an entire operating system.

2. Maintainability. Operating system codebases are large, complex, and long-lived. In the long term, good maintainability is absolutely necessary.

3. Forward-thinking. Focus on what you'll need tomorrow, not what you need today. By the time you have it, tomorrow will be today and today will be yesterday.

4. Iterate quickly. There's a lot I don't know, and ultimately the best way to learn it is to explore the space through programming. It's okay to write some crappy code if that means my next attempt will be much better-- as long as I don't let it build up and interfere with maintainability.