Carve the C heap allocator out of PurgatoryOS and replace it with a no_std Rust implementation wired in via extern C FFI. Set up aarch64-unknown-none-softfloat, build-std core + alloc, the GlobalAlloc trait, a spin-locked free list, and a Makefile that links libpurgatory_rs.a into the existing kernel.elf — without rewriting a single line of C above the allocator.
Drop your AArch64 tasks into EL0, trap into EL1 with the svc instruction, decode ESR_EL1 EC=0x15, dispatch through a syscall table, and return cleanly with eret. Four real syscalls — write, exit, getpid, yield — and the hardware-enforced privilege boundary that makes them possible.
Build a round-robin task scheduler from scratch for your AArch64 bare-metal kernel. Implement the PCB, understand why only callee-saved registers need saving, write the context_switch assembly, and watch two tasks interleave on the UART — the moment your kernel becomes an actual operating system.
Write a bump allocator and then a free-list allocator from scratch in C for your AArch64 bare-metal kernel. Learn block headers, first-fit search, coalescing, alignment, and why Rust's no_std offers a safer alternative. Visualize every allocation interactively.
Build an AArch64 exception vector table from scratch, set up the GICv2 Generic Interrupt Controller on QEMU, and write a working ARM Generic Timer interrupt handler. Your kernel finally responds to the hardware.
Master the AArch64 MMU on bare metal ARM. A deep dive into page table structures, translation levels (L0-L3), and configuring SCTLR_EL1, TCR_EL1, and MAIR_EL1 for kernel memory protection.
Master ELF sections (.text, .rodata, .data, .bss) and fix alignment bugs in your AArch64 linker script. Learn to verify memory maps using readelf for bare-metal ARM development.
Learn how to write a bare-metal C driver for the PL011 UART on AArch64. Master Memory-Mapped I/O (MMIO), the volatile keyword in C, and building a kprint function for QEMU virt without a standard library.