The Tock Embedded Operating System

Abstract

Low-power microcontrollers lack some of the hardware features and most of the memory resources that usually enable multiprogrammable systems. Accordingly, operating system software for these platforms has not provided important features like memory isolation, dynamic memory allocation, and flexible concurrency. However, an emerging class of embedded applications are software platforms, rather than single purpose devices. Tock, a new operating system for low-power platforms, takes advantage of the limited hardware-protection mechanisms available on recent microcontrollers and the type-safety features of the Rust programming language to provide a multiprogramming environment that offers isolation of software faults, memory protection, and efficient memory management for dynamic application workloads written in any language while retaining the dependability requirements of long-running devices.