Talking Tock Week 5

Sept. 25th 2016 by Amit

This is the fifth post in a weekly series tracking the development of Tock, a safe multi-tasking operating system for microcontrollers.

Recently, these updates have been closer to semi-weekly at best, but at least that means there’s plenty to talk about.

HIL updates

Towards our goal releasing a stable enough version in early November to distribute, we’re working on revising the hardware interface layer (HIL) traits that glue chip-specific capsules (like a UART) with portable capsules (like a console).

We’ve begun discussing the UART on the mailing list and @brghena has started prototyping these changes in the uart-async branch. The high-level take aways from the discussion is that it’s important to remove any synchronous calls from the trait and add the ability to receive more than one byte at a time. We’ll also introduce a new Buffer type that wraps statically allocated slices to specifically allow slicing buffers with out losing the ability to exchange the new slice for a reference to the entire buffer.

We also started discussing the GPIO trait in our weekly calls. We’re still resolving some basic questions like how to handle different chip semantics for enabling read and write simultaneously and separating pin control from configuration. @bradjc has begun prototyping some of the changes.

Virtual SPI

@bradjc added a virtual SPI capsule that controls the chip select lines for an entire bus and interleaves SPI transactions to different peripherals. It’s mostly modeled after the virtual I2C capsule.

Offline, we’ve discussed some issues that arise with peripheral drivers that may need more control over when their chip select line is de-asserted. The solution to that will likely be to simply have another option for a slightly-less virtualized capsule. Specifically, clients will be able to “lock” the bus until a high level transaction is completed, but will mean peripheral drivers on the same bus will have to trust each other to “unlock” the bus at some point.

Directory restructure

We discussed then implemented directory structure changes to make it easier and more sensible to navigate despite including several logical crates. In the process, we took the opportunity to combine several crates (common, hil, support and main are now all in the kernel crate), rename the platforms folder to boards (which is less ambiguous) as well as finally switch over completely to a Cargo based build system for the kernel.)

Similarly, we reorganized the user-land library and apps folder into a single userland directory and simplified the build system for apps significantly. First, the user-level library is compiled into a static library which can be included as is in any app so it should be easier to build apps out-of-tree. Second, the Makefile build system has been simplified to a single Makefile that apps include, while the application’s Makefile can compile sources in object files however it wants, as long as those object files end up in the OBJS variable.

s/wait/yield/g

The simpler build system for applications turned out to be more robust and revealed a naming conflict between Tock’s int wait(void) system call and the POSIX pid_t wait(int*) call in libc. We decided to rename wait to yield throughout Tock.