TECS/Rust: Memory-safe Component Framework for Embedded Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces TECS/Rust, a Rust-based component framework for embedded systems that ensures memory safety, automates code generation, and maintains real-time performance, addressing vulnerabilities inherent in traditional C-based CBD.

Contribution

It presents a novel Rust framework for TECS that enhances memory safety in embedded component development while preserving flexibility and efficiency.

Findings

Generated code constitutes a large portion of total system code.

Overhead of the framework is minimal, with negligible impact on execution time.

Framework successfully enforces memory safety without sacrificing performance.

Abstract

As embedded systems grow in complexity and scale due to increased functional diversity, component-based development (CBD) emerges as a solution to streamline their architecture and enhance functionality reuse. CBD typically utilizes the C programming language for its direct hardware access and low-level operations, despite its susceptibility to memory-related issues. To address these concerns, this paper proposes TECS/Rust, a Rust-based framework specifically designed for TECS, which is a component framework for embedded systems. It leverages Rust's compile-time memory-safe features, such as lifetime and borrowing, to mitigate memory vulnerabilities common with C. The proposed framework not only ensures memory safety but also maintains the flexibility of CBD, automates Rust code generation for CBD components, and supports efficient integration with real-time operating systems. An evaluation of the amount of generated code indicates that the code generated by this paper framework accounts for a large percentage of the actual code. Compared to code developed without the proposed framework, the difference in execution time is minimal, indicating that the overhead introduced by the proposed framework is negligible.