Overview of Embedded Rust Operating Systems and Frameworks.

Abstract

Embedded Operating Systems (OSs) are often developed in the C programming language. Developers justify this choice by the performance that can be achieved, the low memory footprint, and the ease of mapping hardware to software, as well as the strong adoption by industry of this programming language. The downside is that C is prone to security vulnerabilities unknowingly introduced by the software developer. Examples of such vulnerabilities are use-after-free, and buffer overflows. Like C, Rust is a compiled programming language that guarantees memory safety at compile time by adhering to a set of rules. There already exist a few OSs and frameworks that are entirely written in Rust, targeting sensor nodes. In this work, we give an overview of these OSs and frameworks and compare them on the basis of the features they provide, such as application isolation, scheduling, inter-process communication, and networking. Furthermore, we compare the OSs on the basis of the performance they provide, such as cycles and memory usage.