Talking Tock Week 1

Aug. 6th 2016 by Amit

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

What’s new in Tock?

@TethysSvensson fixed the static_init! to only allocate as much static memory as needed.
@yuriks Upgraded Tock to Rust nightly version 2016-07-29, catching us up by over 7 months worth of nightly versions.
@KBaichoo implemented a driver for the SAM4L’s flash controller, which is a step towards replacing apps at runtime.
@phil-levis made significant progress on the NRF51822 port, implementing support for the real time counter and GPIO interrupts.
@utkarshapets contributed a UART driver for the NRF51822.
@alevy removed dependencies on the deprecated NUM_PROCS variables in the SPI and BLE drivers, and fixed dependencies in th kernel such that the platform crate is the root of compilation.

Switching from a complicated home-baked Makefile build system to Cargo. This will not only clean up the build system significantly but, more importantly, allow porting to other chips and platforms out of tree.
A native BLE stack for the NRF51822 (based on the Mynewt project).
Runtime programming of apps. As a next step, @KBaichoo is working on a block store abstraction for the flash that allocates storage space in a way that respects requirements of the MPU.