SDV Europe

Tech Take: From Bare-Metal Rust to Certifiable Embedded Systems

Jose Ruiz Embedded Product Manager, AdaCore

Rust is increasingly considered for safety-critical embedded software, yet experience on bare-metal targets remains limited. We present a bare-metal Rust board-support package (BSP) for the AMD Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC, covering boot, exceptions, and interrupts. The BSP supports dynamic memory, heap-allocated data structures, and a part of the std library (including formatted output) without requiring a full operating system.

Building on this work, we analyze the key challenges to adopting Rust in certified systems, including language and toolchain stability, toolchain integrity, long-term maintenance, and the qualification and certification of toolchains and libraries. We outline ongoing efforts toward a certifiable minimal runtime and standard library, including coding-standard compliance and coverage analysis.