Introducing Rust into a Legacy Embedded System
summary
Company printers run Linux and teams introduce Rust into legacy C/C++ firmware using meta rust and cargo-bitbake to cross‑compile and integrate with bitbake; initial strategy isolates Rust in processes for safety, then consolidates many crates into a single busybox-style Rust binary to cut duplicated code and meet tight flash budgets; about a dozen engineers become competent; code size remains the main hurdle but the mono‑binary approach proves effective even when targeting 256 kilobyte RAM zephyr systems.
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chapters (24)
- 0:00Intro
- 1:16Embedded Systems
- 2:20Printer Specific Parts
- 2:45Old Code
- 3:43Laser Printer Industry
- 5:44Our Approach to Rust
- 7:21Using Rust
- 8:34Bitbake
- 9:53Example Recipe
- 10:25Meta Rust
- 12:19Unsafe Code
- 12:54Runtime Memory
- 13:22Code Size
- 14:07Shared Library
- 14:22Lib Standard
- 14:44Shared Libraries
- 16:04The First Pass
- 17:22The Solution
- 18:51The Downside
- 19:30Cons
- 20:27Components
- 20:53OpenIO
- 21:10Build Time
- 22:50Future Improvements
