This is the first post in a weekly series tracking the development of Tock, a safe multi-tasking operating system for microcontrollers.

What’s new in Tock?

• @idolf fixed the static_init! to only allocate as much static memory as needed.

• @yuriks Upgraded Tock to Rust nightly version 2016-07-29, catching us up by over 7 months worth of nightly versions.

• @KBaichoo implemented a driver for the SAM4L’s flash controller, which is a step towards replacing apps at runtime.

• @phil-levis made significant progress on the NRF51822 port, implementing support for the real time counter and GPIO interrupts.

• @utkarshapets contributed a UART driver for the NRF51822.

• @alevy removed dependencies on the deprecated NUM_PROCS variables in the SPI and BLE drivers, and fixed dependencies in th kernel such that the platform crate is the root of compilation.

In the works

• Switching from a complicated home-baked Makefile build system to Cargo. This will not only clean up the build system significantly but, more importantly, allow porting to other chips and platforms out of tree.

• A native BLE stack for the NRF51822 (based on the Mynewt project).

• Runtime programming of apps. As a next step, @KBaichoo is working on a block store abstraction for the flash that allocates storage space in a way that respects requirements of the MPU.