Bare-Metal Rust and Kernel Module Development
Building Safe, High-Performance Systems Without an Operating System Safety Net
Most software lives comfortably above the operating system, protected by abstractions, libraries, and layers of tooling. But some systems live closer to the metal-inside kernels, device drivers, and embedded platforms where every byte of memory and every CPU cycle matters.
Bare-Metal Rust and Kernel Module Development is a hands-on guide for engineers who want to build low-level systems software using Rust while maintaining the safety and performance traditionally associated with languages like C. The book explores how Rust's ownership model, strict memory guarantees, and zero-cost abstractions make it uniquely suited for modern kernel and embedded development.
Readers will learn how to write programs that run without a standard library, interact directly with hardware, manage memory manually, and build custom bootable environments. The guide also walks through creating and deploying kernel modules for operating systems such as Linux, including safe interfaces for interacting with low-level kernel subsystems.
Topics include interrupt handling, device drivers, memory mapping, concurrency primitives, and debugging techniques for environments where traditional runtime support doesn't exist. Practical examples show how to build reliable systems that operate directly on hardware without sacrificing safety.
Because when software runs this close to the machine, every mistake can become a crash-
and Rust is designed to catch those mistakes before the hardware does.
