RTIC - A Zero-Cost Abstraction for Memory Safe Concurrency

Abstract: Embedded systems are commonplace, often with real-time requirements, limited resources and increasingly complex workloads with high demands on security and reliability. The complexity of these systems calls for extensive developer experience and many tools has been created to aid in the development of the software running on such devices. One of these tools, the Real-Time For the Masses (RTFM) concurrency framework developed at Luleå University of Technology (LTU), is built upon a pre-existing, well established and theoretically underpinned execution model providing deadlock free execution and strong guarantees about correctness. The framework is further enhanced by the memory safety provided by Rust, a modern systems programming language. This thesis documents the work done towards improving the framework by studying the possibility to make it extendable. For this, a model of the present layout is required, which in turn requires a solid understanding of Rust's way to structure code. To realise such a large structural change it was advisable to join the open-source RTFM community as a core developer. This role included new responsibilities and required work within different areas of the framework, not only directly related to the primary goal. It also provided the insight that in order to reach the desired extendable structure, many other improvements had to be done first, including the removal of large experimental features. To aid the development, usage of state of the art Continuous Integration testing (CI) were key. Changes to such systems are also part of the development process. The name of the project changed in the middle of this thesis work, going from RTFM to Real-Time Interrupt-driven Concurrency (RTIC). The implemented features and usability fixes detailed in this thesis improves the user experience for embedded system developers resulting in increased productivity while making the development process of such systems more accessible. These general improvements will be part of the next release of the framework. A version v0.6.0-alpha.0 of the framework has been released for testing. The experiences gained related to open-source project governance during this work are also presented.