1. Sockets and async (start here)

• std::net (TcpListener, TcpStream) for blocking basics.
• Tokio for real work. Its official tutorial (tokio.rs/tokio/tutorial) builds a mini-Redis server and client, which covers framing, shared state, and graceful shutdown.
• tokio-util codecs (Framed, LengthDelimitedCodec) for protocol framing, and the bytes crate for buffers.
• socket2 when you need options std doesn’t expose (SO_REUSEPORT, keepalive tuning, buffer sizes, TCP_NODELAY variants). mio if you want the epoll layer under Tokio.

2. Packets and raw access

Assuming you mean Rust-for-Linux (in-tree kernel modules), the usual workflow is a dev shell for the build plus QEMU for testing, rather than booting the kernel on your NixOS machine.

1. Dev shell (shell.nix, channels-style):

{ pkgs ? import <nixpkgs> {} }:
pkgs.mkShell {
  nativeBuildInputs = with pkgs; [
    gnumake flex bison bc pkg-config ncurses
    llvmPackages.clang llvmPackages.lld llvmPackages.libclang
    rustc cargo rust-bindgen rustfmt clippy rust-analyzer
    openssl elfutils perl qemu busybox
  ];
  RUST_LIB_SRC = "${pkgs.rustPlatform.rustLibSrc}";
  LIBCLANG_PATH = "${pkgs.llvmPackages.libclang.lib}/lib";
  hardeningDisable = [ "all" ];
}

hardeningDisable matters because Nix’s default hardening flags break kernel builds.

Finally I have set up my markdown properly.

It starts with Helix: Setup for Markdown. It involves installing dprint. Although it mentions only helix, I have created similar configurations for zed as well.

Below are the configurations files for the respective editors.

languages.toml for helix:

[[language]]
name = "go"
auto-format = true
formatter = { command = "goimports" }

[[language]]
name = "rust"
auto-format = true

[[language]]
name = "c"
auto-format = true

[[language]]
name = "markdown"
auto-format = true
formatter = {command = "dprint", args = ["fmt", "--stdin", "md"]}

settings.json for zed: