Nullex Kernel

Nullex is a kernel written fully in Rust. It is easily extendable and modular, making it easy to implement and make changes to. This kernel currently only runs in QEMU, because I have not tested creating a ISO file.

My goal is to create a fully fledged kernel in Rust, similar to Linux and RedoxOS, aiming to support multiple different architectures, and other things and to also get the community involved in having fun in coding something very tedious, like a Kernel / Operating System.

Thanks so much to Philipp Oppermann's Blog OS Tutorial I highly recommend it if you want to get started into OS and Kernel Programming. This project was started because of him so thanks so much.

Just a quick note: When using cargo test no tests are found. If you want to test something, please use cargo test --test test_name. I will need to fix this in the future.

Features

• Rust-powered: Leverages Rust’s safety guarantees.
• Modular design: Easily extendable and maintainable.

Getting Started

Prerequisites

• Rust (install the appropriate version; nightly is required)
• Cargo
• QEMU
• CMake
• LLVM Tools
• MSYS2 (if on windows)

Installation

Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/Peggun/nullex.git
cd nullex

Install Cargo tools

Install bootimage:

cargo install bootimage

Setup rustup

Install required rustup tools

rustup component add llvm-tools-preview

Install Linux Packages

sudo apt install build-essential make llvm 

Setup MSYS2

To setup MSYS2 tools, we would prefer if you used UCRT64

Install the following:

pacman -S mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-binutils mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-toolchain

Building

You can build the project, but for debugging purposes, you don't need to. Building in release mode is mostly recommended for public release.

cargo build --release

Testing

Run the test suite (READ THE NOTE ABOVE) :

cargo test

Running

Run the QEMU Emulator:

cargo run -- -drive format=raw,file=ext2test.img,index=1,media=disk,if=ide -serial mon:stdio

or

make run

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please check out our CONTRIBUTING.md for details on our code of conduct, and the process for submitting pull requests.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License – see the LICENSE file for details.

Contact

For questions, suggestions, or contributions, please open an issue in this repository.