Show HN: MesaOS – An operating system written from scratch in Rust | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: MesaOS – An operating system written from scratch in Rust

github.com

4 pointscrackanimador13 comments

Hello! I'm a student from Spain and I'm the creator of MesaOS, an open-source operating system written from scratch in Rust for x86_64.

I've been working on it mostly by myself.

MesaOS currently has:

A hybrid kernel Preemptive multitasking A Linux driver shim with 400+ exported kernel symbols (still in development) HDA audio and WAV streaming A shell with around 82 commands VFS, RamFS and persistent initrd File persistence through automatic folder-to-ISO injection SMP / multicore support xHCI / USB 3.0 support

It works on QEMU and on my HP 15s-eq2xxx laptop.

Some of the things I'm currently working on are USB storage, TCP, Wi-Fi and more hardware support.

Wi-Fi is one of the harder problems for me right now. My laptop uses a Realtek RTL8822CE, and there isn't much information available about it.

The project is still very much a work in progress, but I've reached a point where I would like to have other people working on it with me. I'm especially interested in people who like operating systems, kernels, drivers, networking, Rust or low-level programming.

I'm also transparent about using AI during development. The source code is generated using language models based on my instructions. I handle the architecture design, debugging, hardware testing and integration myself.

There is also an English/Spanish Discord server for the project if anyone wants to discuss development or contribute.

Discord: https://discord.gg/sEaB7KAwtr

Open articleView on HN

I have also developed a preemtive-multitasking O/S (and some programming languages to build this and apps) targeted for embedded soft cpu (not x86).

I build tools in Rust, too. I joined your discord but cannot comment anywhere yet (lack of permissions).

Do you use AI coding agents?

Yes. But only for the coding. The rest is still done by me (hardware testing, QEMU, debugging, instructions, ideas, and so on).

I have forked, cloned, and built (had to pin a specific nightly Rust for it to build). When I run it, it crashed at login; I reran it with VNC, was able to login as root, issue ls and uptime, but then it crashed. My AI is debugging...

My AI wrote scripts to launch and attach. I was able to do a lot login in as root. One bug: when I run the ring3 demo, the shell stops accepting input.

so the built-in nano helps a lot, since the help output scrolled off the screen. I tried to use head, less, and more. I could redirect help output to a file (but until I found nano, could not page that). I also looked for dd.

The VNC UI seems generally stable, I was able to log in as all three users, and issue many commands.

Is there a bundled assembler or compiler. How can I write apps for this? Do you have a way to cross-compile and mount a shared folder or scp binaries in?

Hey. Sorry I couldn't reply sooner (I was asleep). Here's how it works: you put your files directly from your main OS into the "inyect" folder (where the `bin` folder and other items are located). You add your binaries there and then rebuild the ISO. That way, when you boot up MesaOS, your file(s) should be inside.

In my fork, I've added ./experiments where I hacked together a shell wrapper for a no_std Rust app to implement head -<n>.

help > help.txt <script path>/head -2 help.txt

works. This shows how I can cross-compile code to run in the MesaOS shell. This is a workaround until I have better libraries/APIs for argc/argv handling, file I/O, etc. Fun!

And by the way, I think I've fixed the Discord issue. Try testing it when you can.

yes, works now, thanks

You might need to either rename (or sue for the name) as MesaOS is in use by a Restaurant POS software.

https://mesaos.com/

Wow. That's true. I think I should do it. But sometime in the future (it would just be a small name change, nothing major).

In one of his interviews, Linus suggested that next-gen OS would be written in Rust. You picked an interesting track, starred your repo!

I’m pretty sure work is already underway to port Linux to Rust in upcoming versions. And thanks for the star!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com