Common helpers for the multiboot2 and multiboot2-header crates.
The following figures, not displayable in lib.rs / on docs.rs unfortunately,
outline the design of this crate. In the following figure, you can see the
four classes of Multiboot2 structures and their memory properties. The four
kinds of Multiboot2 structures are boot information, boot information
tags, header, and header tags. All share the same technical foundation: They
have a common header and a possible dynamic size, depending on the header.
In the next figure, you see how the types from multiboot2-common are used
to parse a raw byte slice as the corresponding Multiboot2 structure a safe
manner. The BytesRef wrapper ensures basic memory guarantees for the
underlying &[u8] slice, while DynSizedStructure can then be used to
safely cast to the target type.
The next figure is like the previous figure, but shows a more specific parsing
flow by using example types of the multiboot2 crate. Specifically, it shows
how the header structs for each multiboot2 structure, each implementing
the Header trait, are utilized as generic types to get the right size
information of the final type tag type.
Green shows the raw memory, purple boxes refer to logic in multiboot2-common,
and red components show structs from the multiboot2 crate.
The last complex figure shows all traits and structs from multiboot2-common,
their internal relation, and how consumers (multiboot2 and
multiboot2-header) consume them. As this figure is quite complex, we recommend
to first study the inner box (multiboot2-common) and then study how types from
multiboot2 (orange) and multiboot2-header (green) interface with
multiboot2-common.
The MSRV is 1.75.0 stable.
See main README file.