lilos: A minimal async RTOS

This is a wee RTOS written to support the async style of programming in Rust. It's a research project, a playground, and a proof of concept.

(lilos 1 was a wee RTOS written to support multithreaded message-passing programs on AVR; this is technically lilos 2 but who's counting.)

About

lilos is unusual for an RTOS:

• async-based cooperative multitasking
• No dynamic memory allocation
• Low memory consumption
• Applications can be written entirely in safe code

Concrete example: code to blink an LED on the STM32F407's pin D13. (Note that a real application also needs a main, this just shows the one task.)

use core::time::Duration;
use os::exec::sleep_for;
use stm32f4xx::stm32f407::GPIOD;

async fn blinky_task(gpiod: &GPIOD) -> ! {
    let period = Duration::from_millis(500);
    loop {
        gpiod.bsrr.write(|w| w.bs13().set_bit()); 
        sleep_for(period).await;
        gpiod.bsrr.write(|w| w.br13().set_bit()); 
        sleep_for(period).await;
    }
}

For complete worked examples, see the examples directory, particularly:

• examples/stm32f4/minimal is the simplest LED blinky program.
• examples/stm32f4/blinky is a fancier blinky program.
• examples/stm32f4/uart_echo does UART I/O across tasks with a queue.

If you'd like to read about this at length, see the technical report.

Features

By default, lilos includes the core OS and some useful data structures for inter-task communication. You can turn those off with --no-default-features and go a la carte:

• mutex enables the lilos::mutex module.
• spsc enables the lilos::spsc module.

Nightly

lilos relies on a single unstable language feature: the never type, which is necessary to write the type of a future that loops forever, Future<Output = !>. (I thought this was going to stabilize imminently when I published lilos, but it keeps running into problems.)

As a result, lilos itself and applications built on lilos need to be built with a nightly toolchain. lilos is tested against the nightly version named in the rust-toolchain file in its repo; for best results, use that version or later.

We will drop the nightly requirement as soon as the never type stabilizes. To give users the most flexiblity, we hope not to introduce any more unstable features.

Contact and License

If you have questions, or you use it for something, I'd love to find out! Send me an email.

I'm experimenting with using the MPL-2 for subversive reasons. I'm open to relicensing this code if MPL-2 doesn't work for your organization, we'll just need to discuss your labor practices. ;-)