Tracking Issue for Second Edition #360

Create a second edition of the blog, which reorders the posts (exceptions before page tables) and uses an own bootloader. This should make the posts easier to follow.

Edit: This issue will serve as a tracking issue. The “Second Edition” milestone contains all associated issues and pull requests.

Planned high-level changes

• Create a custom, dependency free bootloader
  • Written completely in inline assembly to be dependency free (see this comment for details)
  • First prototype: https://github.com/rust-osdev/bootloader
• Work out a new order of posts
  • Remove the sudden jump in difficulty with the “Page Tables” post
  • My current plan: Setup & printing first, then exceptions and hardware interrupts (including keyboard and timer support, and maybe even multithreading), then memory management
• Move more code into the x86_64 crate
  • Remove low-level implementation details (e.g. how to align a memory address) from the blog text, but …
  • Document the code in the x86_64 crate very well and ecourage readers to look at it

Further changes

• Link using LLD (Link using lld #370)
  • LLD is about to be shipped with rustc: rust: Import LLD for linking wasm objects rust-lang/rust#48125
• “Kernel Heap”: include more allocator types
• [ ] Put the kernel in the higher half of the address space (see Tracking Issue for Second Edition #360 (comment)) maybe sometimes in the future when we introduce linker scripts
• Unit tests and other tests? (see Add testing framework for the kernel robert-w-gries/rxinu#32 for an overview of possibilities)
• Be platform independent: The blog should work on Linux, Mac, and Windows
  • There are CI jobs that verify this.

Other planned things

• Use rustfmt-nightly so that the code always has standard format. Check formatting via travis.
• Docker support (Add docker support #369)
• Make sure that every code snippet has a comment that specifies the file path (Make sure that every code snippet has a comment that specifies the file path #382).

Maybe

• [ ] Use a javascript emulator in blog posts (Use javascript emulator in blog posts #368) Postponed, since there is no 64-bit js emulator yet

(This list is far from complete and will be extended over time.)