Poplar

Poplar was previously called Pebble. It was renamed to avoid confusion with the OS that runs on the defunct Pebble smartwatches

Poplar is a microkernel and userspace written in Rust, exploring modern ideas. It is not a UNIX, and does not aim for compatibility with existing software.

The best way to learn about Poplar is to read the book. The website also hosts some other useful resources.

Building and running

Operating systems tend to be complex to build and run. We've tried to make this as simple as we can, but if you encounter problems or have suggestions to make it easier, feel free to file an issue :)

Getting the source

Firstly, clone the repository and fetch the submodules:

git clone https://github.com/IsaacWoods/poplar.git
git submodule update --init --recursive

Things you'll need

• A nightly Rust toolchain
• The rust-src component (install with rustup component add rust-src)
• A working QEMU installation (one that provides qemu-system-{arch})

To compile userspace programs, you'll need to build our custom Rust toolchain:

• Clone IsaacWoods/rust and checkout the poplar branch
• (Optional) rebase against rust-lang/rust to get the latest chages
• Copy isaacs_config.toml to config.toml (or use your own)
• Run ./x.py build -i library/std to build a stage-1 compiler and libstd
• Create a toolchain with rustup toolchain link poplar build/{host triple}/stage1 (e.g. rustup toolchain link poplar build/x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/stage1)

You don't need this toolchain to build the bootloaders, kernel, or no_std user programs, so you can get started without it!

Building

This repository includes an xtask-based build tool to simplify building and running Poplar.

• Running cargo xtask dist will build a disk image for x86_64
• Running cargo xtask qemu will build a disk image for x86_64, and then start emulating it in QEMU

See cargo xtask --help for more information about how to invoke the build system.