v0.5.0 of Real Time For the Masses (RTFM), the embedded concurrency framework, is coming out soon-ish – some time after Rust 1.36 is released – and will include experimental support for homogeneous and heterogeneous multi-core Cortex-M devices. This blog post covers the upcoming multi-core API and includes a refresher on the single-core API. Heterogeneous support in μAMP But first, one update relevant to multi-core RTFM from the μAMP (microamp) front since the last post: cargo-microamp has gained support for heterogeneous multi-core devices. ... Read more

An asymmetric multiprocessing (AMP) system is a multiprocessor computer system where not all of the multiple interconnected central processing units (CPUs) are treated equally. – Wikipedia What is μAMP? microamp (styled as μAMP) is a framework (library plus cargo subcommand) for building bare-metal applications that target AMP systems. This blog post is a deep dive into this framework which serves as the core foundation of the multi-core version of Real Time For the Masses (RTFM), which I’ll cover in the next blog post. ... Read more

Hey there! It’s been a long time since my last post. Today I’m pleased to announce v0.4.0 of the Real Time for The Masses framework (AKA RTFM), a concurrency framework for building real time applications. The greatest new feature, IMO, is that RTFM now works on stable Rust (1.31+)! 🎉 🎉 🎉 This release also packs quite a few new features which I’ll briefly cover in this post. For a more throughout explanation of RTFM’s task model and its capabilities check out the RTFM book, which includes examples you can run on your laptop (yay for emulation), and the API documentation. ... Read more

RTFM (Real Time For the Masses) v0.3.0 is out! This blog post will cover the goodies of this new release. The minor (breaking) release was mainly to become compatible with the new IO model presented in my previous blog post, but a new feature also shipped with this release: safe creation of &'static mut references. First, let’s look at one feature that landed in v0.2.1 but that didn’t get documented in this blog, yet it was essential to adapt RTFM to the new IO model: ... Read more

Hiya folks! It’s been a while. Today I’m pleased to present the next version of the Real Time For the Masses framework: cortex-m-rtfm v0.2.0 or just v2, which is how I like to call it. Here’s the executive summary of the changes: v2 is simpler. v1 used a bunch of tokens – ceiling tokens, priority tokens, preemption threshold tokens and task tokens – for memory safety; this made the API rather boilerplatery. ... Read more

I want to start by thanking all the people that has sent improvements and comments to all the crates and tools I presented in the last blog post. The Rust community rocks! Last time I showed you how to easily develop Rust programs for pretty much any ARM Cortex-M microcontroller. In this post I’ll show you one way of doing memory safe concurrency. It’s important to note that the Rust language doesn’t impose a single concurrency model. ... Read more