I'm Building an OS From Scratch in Rust — And It Already Has a Desktop, Filesystem, and Networking
A deep dive into CottonOS: a hobby OS written entirely in Rust with a custom filesystem, GUI, preemptive multitasking, and experimental in-kernel TLS.
There's a specific kind of madness that strikes some programmers: the urge to not just use an operating system, but to build one. From the bootloader all the way up to the window manager. No Linux underneath. No BSD. Just you, your CPU, and a whole lot of page faults.
That's what CottonOS is.
I've been building it as a hobby project and learning experiment — a full OS kernel written in Rust for x86_64, featuring a custom filesystem I call CottonFS, a graphical desktop environment with working windows and a taskbar, preemptive multitasking, and an experimental in-kernel HTTPS stack. It's nowhere near production-ready, but it boots, it renders windows, it reads and writes files, and it can make HTTP requests — entirely from scratch.
