Making a RISC-V operating system using Rust

As RISC-V progressively challenges the existing ARM processor ecosystem it’s interesting to see more and more software projects popping up that aim that RISC-V architecture.

Here’s one project that aims to develop (and explain along the way) how to create an operating system from scratch. On top of the RISC-V specifics this tutorial also aims to teach how this all can be done in a programming language called Rust.

Keep in mind that all of this is done on a baremetal system. No other software is running.

RISC-V (“risk five”) and the Rust programming language both start with an R, so naturally they fit together. In this blog, we will write an operating system targeting the RISC-V architecture in Rust (mostly). If you have a sane development environment for RISC-V, you can skip the setup parts right to bootloading. Otherwise, it’ll be fairly difficult to get started.

This tutorial will progressively build an operating system from start to something that you can show your friends or parents — if they’re significantly young enough. Since I’m rather new at this I decided to make it a “feature” that each blog post will mature as time goes on. More details will be added and some will be clarified. I look forward to hearing from you!

The Adventures of OS