We’re very happy to announce the first release of Ariel OS, an embedded Rust library OS. Ariel OS runs on small MCUs like nRF5x, RP2xxx, STM32 and ESP32. It is based on Embassy, and turns that into a full-blown RTOS, with preemptive multi-core scheduling and many OS-like conveniences.
We believe it offers a new combination of features that might be interesting:
- It supports writing applications as both async and threaded code, mix-and-match.
- It helps a lot in reducing boilerplate. Networking, threads & multi-core suppport, random numbers, flash storage are all readily available, with a sane and usually customizable default configuration.
- It helps writing portable applications. Ariel applications start out being fully ported to all supported boards, then get specialized. This might be interesting to library authors as well, for simplified testing on multiple platforms.
- It helps handling the little differences between MCUs. E.g, rustc target configuration, using
defmtor not,probe-rsoresp-flash, are just build system flags. Ariel OS’ meta build system handles the necessary Cargo and tooling configuration. - It integrates
embedded-testfor turn-key testing on real hardware. - It’s all Embassy & smoltcp & embedded-hal(-async) & embedded-nal(-async) & … under the hood, and it is easy to not use the abstractions if needed.
What we’re working on right now or very soon:
- building on stable Rust
- BLE support
- a nice DSL for defining boards, aiming at no-code porting of applications
- low power handling
- a native “port” where Ariel can run as Linux/OSX application
We’re at the beginning, but think that Ariel OS might already be useful to many of you, especially for reducing boiler plate and getting started more quickly.
Let us know what you think!
Join us on Matrix in #ariel-os:matrix.org.
That sounds good! Tried embedded Rust on an ESP32 about 1.5 years ago and it was still a bit of a pain. So it’s good to see options like this that seem to focus on DX!
While we’ve spent quite some effort in Ariel to get ESP to run as smoothly as everything else, large parts of the credit for making that simpler go Espressif, who are putting a lot of effort into making this easy to use despite their weird architecture. In particular, for the RISC-V based ESPs that are supported, Ariel doesn’t need any special setup any more at all. (Even the binary blobs are pulled in automatically, which to me personally is a sore point, but does make things convenient; I hope we can integrate the reverse-engineered Wi-Fi rather sooner than later.)