Rust On L4Re

This repository contains a patched version of the L4Re microkernel operating system that includes support for Rust client and server applications. At its heart, the L4Rust libraries enable a Rust developer to efficiently develop Rust clients and servers running on top of a highly configurable, secure and performant OS. Rust services and clients can communicate without adaptation with C++ server and clients from L4Re.

Suggestions, criticism and everything else is welcome, contact me on IRC as Moomoc in the Mozilla, Freenode or OFTC network.

L4Re Setup

This is better explained in RL4Re's README, but in short you need (GNU) make, gcc, libgcc, bison and flex. Execute make setup and make -j4 afterwards. If compilation aborts with "failed to build l4linux", you successfully build everything except l4linux which isn't required.

This L4Re snapshot needs to reside in a path without any spaces, thanks to Makes inability to treat those appropriately. Enter the L4Re source tree root and type make ssetup to choose the build target. Then type make, followed by half a dozen tea breaks.

Now you need to configure the object directory for your build. Open a new file called obj/l4/amd64/conf/Makeconf.local and specify the object directory; substitute amd64 through the chosen architecture. Assuming you are on x86_64 (AKA amd64) and the source tree is below /home/user/l4re, the content might look like this:

OBJ_BASE=/home/USER/rustl4re/obj/l4/amd64

Rust Compilation

Rust doesn't ship binary versions of the cross-compiled std crate. There is also a minor deficiency in passing linker arguments containing spaces, so you need a slightly patched Rust compiler yourself. Grab the source from https://github.com/humenda/rust and follow these steps:

• Create a file config.toml in the repository root with this content:

  [llvm]
  optimize = true
  [build]
  build = "x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu"    # defaults to your host platform
  target = ["x86_64-unknown-l4re-uclibc"] # defaults to just the build triple
  docs = false
  [install]
  prefix = '/your/preferred/path'
  [rust]
  optimize = true
  use-jemalloc = false
  backtrace = false
  
  You should adjust both prefix and potentially the `build =`-line, if you
  don't use Linux on a `x86_64` machine.
  

• For building Rust with std:

  $ python3 x.py --host=x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu --target=x86_64-unknown-l4re-uclibc

Then you can proceed to building the L4Re source tree, see the linked instructions above or with hacking, see below.

Branch setup

The branch upstream contains the original L4Re snapshot. The patches to the build system BID are in bid_changes which is rebased on upstream if a new version comes out. master is based on bid_changes and contains all the library implementation of l4rust and a few sample applications, see pkg/l4rust and pkg/oxisamples.

The branch bench contains some hackish benchmarking applications. These are are not guaranteed to run in all environments, patches welcome.