Talking Tock 42

Bootloader, restarting processes and changing clocks

May 22nd 2018 by Amit

This is the 42nd post in a series tracking the development of Tock, a safe multi-tasking operating system for microcontrollers.

1. A Tock-based Bootloader
2. Pull Requests
   1. Merged
   2. Proposed

A Tock-based Bootloader

@bradjc mixed some existing pieces with some good-old-fashion elbow grease to rewrite the bootloader we use for the SAM4L (Hail and imix boards) using Tock! Better yet, most of the code is completely portable and can be used for any chip ported to Tock that has a UART, flash and GPIO implementation.

Pull Requests

Bolded pull requests were marked “P-Significant”

Merged

• (#923) Update Cortex-M systick to new register interface
• (#924) Detect RF233 CHANNEL_ACCESS_FAILURE (max CSMA retry) failures
• (#926) Remove unneeded type qualifier from RF233
• (#928) Build lst file in separate make target
• (#929) Fix protected register access bugs on SAM4L
• (#937) Remove redundant rustfmt.toml
• (#934) Fix comment formatting
• (#940) Remove unused pub qualifiers
• (#945) Add soundness.md document
• (#943) Add receive_abort to UART HIL
• (#938) Nrf51822Serialization/capsule map -> map_or
• (#931) Make IPC optional for boards

Proposed

• (#933) Dynamically Change System Clock on SAM4L
• (#935) Move deferred call mechanism to kernel crate
• (#936) UART HIL Changes
• (#941) Allow kernel to restart processes
• (#942) Implement flash HIL for NRF52 NVMC controller
• (#944) Add nrf52840-DK board