GoKawiilPublished on: 26. May 2026
Rust (and Slint) on a jailbroken Kindle.
I recently jailbroke my 7th generation Kindle Paperwhite. While my motivation probably should have been "breaking free from Amazon's clammy and tightening grip", the truth is I wanted a way to use it as a clock on my nightstand. I found this project and figured I could just make some adjustments to the code. And that worked fine. But as I now had opened the door, I started thinking about if I could get Rust to work on the Kindle as well. Maybe I could do more useful stuff with it? As I have recently started to tinker with Home Assistant and smart devices again, the idea of a dashboard for some of the features could be a fun project. And while there are probably many perfectly fine projects out there, I haven't made any of those.
Telling a programmer there's already a library to do X is like telling a songwriter there's already a song about love.
-Pete Cordell
Cross compiling Rust for the Kindle
After some research I found out that I needed to target ARMv7 and musl libc. I have dabbled with Rust on ARM machines before, and know from painful experience that getting the Rust compilation toolchain to work on such low-powered devices is a non-starter. Luckily there are great tools for cross compilation. My go-to for cross compiling Rust is, rather ironically, cargo-zigbuild . The Zig compiler ships with musl libc sources and headers built in, for all supported architectures. It also has its own linker, so zig cc can act as a complete cross-compile toolchain for any musl target, on any host. Compiling for the Kindle becomes as easy as:
* Installing Zig * Installing cargo-zigbuild * cargo zigbuild --release --target armv7-unknown-linux-musleabihf
Getting shell access on the Kindle
With my hello-world-app ready and built, I needed a way to get it on the kindle and run it. While I probably could have used KUAL which I installed during the jailbreaking process, I wanted to also be able to see stdout to verify my application actually works. After some digging I found the USBNetwork tool that allows for setting up SSH access to your device either via USB or Wifi. For convenience I added an entry in my sshconfig and copied over my public key. Note: ssh-copy-id did not work for me, I had to add my .pub file to /mnt/us/usbnet/etc/authorized_keys on the Kindle.
... continue reading