Xous is a microkernel operating system with processes, threads, and messages. It is designed to have an extremely small kernel that delegates as much as possible to userspace. This book describes the operating system kernel as well as the services that support normal operating system behavior.
As this book is a work in progress, some chapters are placeholders and will appear blank.
The book is written for two audiences: kernel maintainers, and application developers.
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Chapters 2 (Server Architecture),
- 3 (Introducing the Kernel), and
- 5 (System Startup) are primarily for kernel maintainers and system programmers.
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Chapters 1 (Getting Started),
- 4 (Renode Emulation),
- 6 (Build System Overview),
- 7 (Messages) and
- 8 (Graphics) are more appropriate for application developers.
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Chapter 9 (PDDB) covers the Plausibly Deniable DataBase, and has sub-sections for both kernel and application developers.
This version of the text assumes you’re using Rust 1.85.0 (released 2025-02-17) or later with edition = "2024" in the Cargo.toml file of all projects to configure them to use Rust 2024 Edition idioms. See the “Installation” section of Chapter 1 for instructions on installing or updating Rust, and see Appendix E for information on editions.
The HTML format is available online at https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/book/ and offline with installations of Rust made with rustup; run rustup doc --book to open.
Several community translations are also available.
This website is an experiment by the Cognitive Engineering Lab at Brown University. The goal of this experiment is to evaluate and improve the content of the Rust Book to help people learn Rust more effectively.
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