x86 / amd64 library

Library to program x86 (amd64) hardware. Contains x86 specific data structure descriptions, data-tables, as well as convenience function to call assembly instructions typically not exposed in higher level languages.

Currently supports:

• I/O registers
• Control registers
• Debug registers
• MSR registers
• Segmentation
• Descriptor-tables (GDT, LDT, IDT)
• IA32-e page table layout
• Interrupts (with xAPIC and x2APIC, I/O APIC drivers)
• Task state
• Performance counter information
• Intel SGX: Software Guard Extensions
• Random numbers (rdrand, rdseed)
• Time (rdtsc, rdtscp)
• Querying CPUID (uses raw_cpuid library)
• Transactional memory (Intel RTM and HLE)
• Virtualization (Intel VMX)

This library depends on libcore so it can be used in kernel level code.

Testing

We use two forms of tests for the crate. Regular tests with #[test] that run in a ring 3 process and #[x86test] tests that run in a VM (and therefore grant a privileged execution environment, see x86test).

# To execute x86tests run:
$ RUSTFLAGS="-C relocation-model=dynamic-no-pic -C code-model=kernel" RUST_BACKTRACE=1 cargo test --features vmtest

# To execute the regular tests, run:
$ cargo test --features utest

Features

• performance-counter: Includes the performance counter information. Note this feature can increase compilation time significantly due to large, statically generated hash-tables that are included in the source. Therefore, it is disabled by default.

Documentation

• API Documentation

lib.rs:

This implements the x86test macro to run and also customize the execution of KVM based unit-tests.