tl;dr: I expect NUMS[2] to equal NUMS[keycode] when keycode == 2. This doesn’t appear to be the case, and I don’t understand how this is possible.

I’m trying to set up keycode handling in my kernel, and I’m having a strange problem with array indexing that I can’t really fathom at all (except “something is wrong”).

When I run this code, and press 1 several times, it prints |2C |2C |2C |2C |2C |2C |2C |2C |2C .

I am expecting it to print |2C2|2C2|2C2|2C2|2C2|2C2|2C2|2C2|2C2|.

Here is the code:

// some imports removed
static NUMS: &'static [u8] = bytes!("01234567890");

#[no_mangle]
pub unsafe fn _interrupt_handler_kbd() {
    let keycode: u8 = inb(0x60);
    if (keycode == 2 || keycode == 3) {
        stdio::putc(NUMS[2]); // should be '2'. It is.
        stdio::putc(65 + keycode); // should be 'C' (keycode = 2), because 'A' is 65 
        stdio::putc(NUMS[keycode]); // should be '2', BUT IT ISN'T. IT IS SOMETHING ELSE. HOW IS THIS HAPPENING. 
        stdio::putc(124); /// this is '|', just as a delimiter.
    }
    outb(0x20, 0x20); // Tell the interrupt handler that we're done.
}

To summarize:

• the 2 is printed by putc(NUMS[2])
• the C is printed by putc(65 + keycode). This implies that keycode == 2, since 65 is ‘A’
• the blank space is printed by putc(NUMS[keycode]). I would expect this to print 2. But no.

For bonus points, if I replace if (keycode == 2 || keycode == 3) { with if(keycode == 2) {, then it prints |2C2|2C2|2C2|2C2|2C2|2C2|2C2|2C2|2C2|, which is right. I think this is because of a compiler optimization replacing keycode with 2.

If you have qemu and a nightly build of rust installed, you can run this code by doing

git clone git@github.com:jvns/rustboot.git
cd rustboot
git checkout origin/compiler-nonsense
git submodule init
git submodule update
make run

Some hypotheses:

• There’s something wrong with the Rust compiler
• There’s something wrong with the stack and how I’m calling _interrupt_handler_kbd
• ?????????

I also can’t yet find the address of _interrupt_handler_kbd to look at the assembly to debug. It’s in the symbol table of the original object file (main.o), but after linking it’s not in main.bin, so I can’t set a breakpoint in gdb.

Ack.

Edit: Brian Mastenbrook suggested to link using ELF and then use objcopy to create a binary, and that somehow magically fixed the problem (this commit). If anyone can explain why, I would be Extremely Interested.