Talking Tock Week 3

Aug. 22nd 2016 by Amit

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

What’s new in Tock?

• Tock is officially buildable entirely with Cargo.

• @phil-levis has a pull-request open with a serious overhaul of the NRF51 port, supporting most basic functionality to run Tock on an NRF51 development kit—GPIO input and output and timers, with UART in the works.

Tracking long-term progress

Imix platform

@shaneleonard is working on a development board based on the Firestorm that will be widely available (details to come). It is particularly amenable to Tock development since it exposes many more internal pins for debugging as well as facilitating power-measurement of individual components.

Native Bluetooth Low-Energy Stack

@phil-levis is leading a port of the Mynewt project’s open source BLE stack for the NRF51 and NRF52 to Tock. Initially, we will run Mynewt as a process with the radio hardware registers exposed to it using the MPU. We will then slowly port layers of the library into Rust drivers in the kernel.

Programming apps at runtime

@KBaichoo has finished a block store abstraction that respects the alignment rules of the ARM Cortex-M memory protection unit. The next step is build a layer on top that gets contiguous blocks of storage sized for an app and program it.