Logo
ScienceStack
Table of Contents
Fetching ...
Sign In

Ariel OS: An Embedded Rust Operating System for Networked Sensors & Multi-Core Microcontrollers

Elena Frank, Kaspar Schleiser, Romain Fouquet, Koen Zandberg, Christian Amsüss, Emmanuel Baccelli

TL;DR

Ariel OS addresses the gap of Rust-based embedded operating systems supporting multicore preemptive scheduling on 32-bit MCUs by delivering a global, SMP-capable scheduler with tight hardware abstraction and async Rust integration. Built on a tickless, preemptive single-core baseline, it extends to multicore with support for core reallocation and dynamic thread selection, plus priority inheritance and safe synchronization. Micro-benchmarks on RP2040, RP2350, and ESP32-S3 show the dynamic thread selection variant yields the best performance with modest multicore overhead, and matrix-multiplication tests approach a near 2x speedup for large problems, despite memory bus contention. The project emphasizes portability, transparency, and practical applicability for small networked devices, providing open-source code and a unified platform for research and industry practice in secure, distributed MCU software.

Abstract

Large swaths of low-level system software building blocks originally implemented in C/C++ are currently being swapped for equivalent rewrites in Rust, a relatively more secure and dependable programming language. So far, however, no embedded OS in Rust supports multicore preemptive scheduling on microcontrollers. In this paper, we thus fill this gap with a new operating system: Ariel OS. We describe its design, we provide the source code of its implementation, and we perform micro-benchmarks on the main 32-bit microcontroller architectures: ARM Cortex-M, RISC-V and Espressif Xtensa. We show how our scheduler takes advantage of several cores, while incurring only small overhead on single-core hardware. As such, Ariel OS provides a convenient embedded software platform for small networked devices, for both research and industry practitioners.

Ariel OS: An Embedded Rust Operating System for Networked Sensors & Multi-Core Microcontrollers

TL;DR

Ariel OS addresses the gap of Rust-based embedded operating systems supporting multicore preemptive scheduling on 32-bit MCUs by delivering a global, SMP-capable scheduler with tight hardware abstraction and async Rust integration. Built on a tickless, preemptive single-core baseline, it extends to multicore with support for core reallocation and dynamic thread selection, plus priority inheritance and safe synchronization. Micro-benchmarks on RP2040, RP2350, and ESP32-S3 show the dynamic thread selection variant yields the best performance with modest multicore overhead, and matrix-multiplication tests approach a near 2x speedup for large problems, despite memory bus contention. The project emphasizes portability, transparency, and practical applicability for small networked devices, providing open-source code and a unified platform for research and industry practice in secure, distributed MCU software.

Abstract

Large swaths of low-level system software building blocks originally implemented in C/C++ are currently being swapped for equivalent rewrites in Rust, a relatively more secure and dependable programming language. So far, however, no embedded OS in Rust supports multicore preemptive scheduling on microcontrollers. In this paper, we thus fill this gap with a new operating system: Ariel OS. We describe its design, we provide the source code of its implementation, and we perform micro-benchmarks on the main 32-bit microcontroller architectures: ARM Cortex-M, RISC-V and Espressif Xtensa. We show how our scheduler takes advantage of several cores, while incurring only small overhead on single-core hardware. As such, Ariel OS provides a convenient embedded software platform for small networked devices, for both research and industry practitioners.
Paper Structure (23 sections, 5 figures)

This paper contains 23 sections, 5 figures.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Prior work on Multicore Scheduling on MCUs
  3. Goals of Ariel OS and its Scheduler
  4. Single-Core Scheduler Basis & Optimization
  5. Ariel OS Multicore Scheduler Design
  6. Startup
  7. Global Scheduling Scheme
  8. Assigning Threads to Cores
  9. Core Affinity Masks
  10. Dynamic Priorities and Priority Inheritance
  11. Synchronization in the Scheduler
  12. Combining Scheduled Threads & Async Rust Tasks
  13. Ariel OS Scheduler Implementation
  14. Hardware Abstraction
  15. Platform-specific Scheduling Logic
  16. ...and 8 more sections

Figures (5)

  • Figure 1: Threading startup on a dual-core system.
  • Figure 2: Context switching performance of the two multicore scheduler designs compared with single-core configuration.
  • Figure 3: Overhead of the multicore scheduling feature, measured on single-core hardware.
  • Figure 4: Multiplication of $N\times N$ matrices, $N\in\{10, 20, ..., 80\}$
  • Figure 5: Ariel OS architecture diagram.