Oxide64

Overview

Oxide64 is a small toy kernel written in Rust which isn't meant to have any real functionality. All it's supposed to be is a kernel which I can mess around with while learning many low-level concepts.

Building

Tip

Before building Oxide64, you will need the following tools installed:

• cargo
• grub2-mkrescue (is under different packages on different Linux distributions)
• xorriso

Important

On some Linux distributions, the grub2-mkrescue binary is called grub-mkrescue. They both correspond to the same grub2 binary. If this is the case on your distro, run make with the MKRESCUE environment variable set to grub-mkrescue.

Note

The reason why Oxide64 uses make rather than cargo's build tool is because it's easier to use my linker script when linking manually with ld and cargo's build tool cannot assemble my assembly for me before linking with the resulting Rust binary.

To build Oxide64, run make in the project's root directory.

Running

Tip

Before running Oxide64, you will need a disk image formatted with the FAT16 file system. To create a disk image and format it as FAT16, run:

qemu-img create -f raw disk.img 256M
mkfs.fat -F16 disk.img

You will also need QEMU and KVM set up. If you would not like to use KVM, modify the Makefile and remove the -enable-kvm flag in the QEMU command.

Make can also be used to run a QEMU/KVM virtual machine for Oxide64.

To run Oxide64, run make run in the project's root directory.

Flashing

Important

Oxide64 cannot run on modern hardware! It currently uses many older hardware features, such as:

• ATA PIO
• 8259 PIC
• 8253/8254 PIT
• PS/2 Keyboard

This is because implementing drivers for these older hardware features is much simpler and easier than implementing drivers for their modern replacements (such as AHCI, APIC, APIC Timer and xHCI).

I would personally recommend using your own flashing tool to flash the resulting oxide64.iso, but I do have a make flash target set up to flash the iso to /dev/sda which is usually what my personal USB drive shows up as.

Cleaning

Make is once again used to clean all unnecessary build garbage.

To clean all unnecessary files, run make clean in the project's root directory.