Show HN: MesaOS – An operating system written from scratch in Rust • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: MesaOS – An operating system written from scratch in Rust

#11

Post by softwarewright » Fri, Sep 04, 2026, 3:06 AM UTC

softwarewright wrote: post #7

crackanimador wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. But only for the coding. The rest is still done by me (hardware testing, QEMU, debugging, instructions, ideas, and so on).

I have forked, cloned, and built (had to pin a specific nightly Rust for it to build). When I run it, it crashed at login; I reran it with VNC, was able to login as root, issue ls and uptime, but then it crashed. My AI is debugging...

In my fork, I've added ./experiments where I hacked together a shell wrapper for a no_std Rust app to implement head -.

help > help.txt /head -2 help.txt

works. This shows how I can cross-compile code to run in the MesaOS shell. This is a workaround until I have better libraries/APIs for argc/argv handling, file I/O, etc. Fun!

Re: Show HN: MesaOS – An operating system written from scratch in Rust

#12

Post by crackanimador » Fri, Sep 04, 2026, 5:23 AM UTC

drivingmenuts wrote: post #10

You might need to either rename (or sue for the name) as MesaOS is in use by a Restaurant POS software. https://mesaos.com/

Wow. That's true. I think I should do it. But sometime in the future (it would just be a small name change, nothing major).

Re: Show HN: MesaOS – An operating system written from scratch in Rust

#13

Post by crackanimador » Fri, Sep 04, 2026, 5:26 AM UTC

tbrntbqm wrote: post #5

In one of his interviews, Linus suggested that next-gen OS would be written in Rust. You picked an interesting track, starred your repo!

I’m pretty sure work is already underway to port Linux to Rust in upcoming versions. And thanks for the star!

Re: Show HN: MesaOS – An operating system written from scratch in Rust

#14

Post by crackanimador » Fri, Sep 04, 2026, 5:37 AM UTC

softwarewright wrote: post #9

softwarewright wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have forked, cloned, and built (had to pin a specific nightly Rust for it to build). When I run it, it crashed at login; I reran it with VNC, was able to login as root, issue ls and uptime, but then it crashed. My AI is debugging...

so the built-in nano helps a lot, since the help output scrolled off the screen. I tried to use head, less, and more. I could redirect help output to a file (but until I found nano, could not page that). I also looked for dd. The VNC UI seems generally stable, I was able to log in as all three users, and issue many commands. Is there a bundled assembler or compiler. How can I write apps for this? Do you have a way to…

Hey. Sorry I couldn't reply sooner (I was asleep). Here's how it works: you put your files directly from your main OS into the "inyect" folder (where the `bin` folder and other items are located). You add your binaries there and then rebuild the ISO. That way, when you boot up MesaOS, your file(s) should be inside.