Rust in NuttX

Warning

This guide is under development. Rust support in NuttX is experimental.

Introduction

NuttX is exploring Rust integration to provide memory safety guarantees and modern language features while maintaining its small footprint and real-time capabilities.

This guide covers:

  • Setting up Rust toolchain for NuttX development

  • Building Rust components with NuttX

  • Interoperability between Rust and C

  • Testing Rust components

Prerequisites

  • Rust toolchain installed (rustup recommended)

  • NuttX build environment configured

  • Basic knowledge of Rust and NuttX development

Supported Platforms

  • AArch64 (WIP)

  • ARMv7-A (WIP)

  • ARMv6-M

  • ARMv7-M

  • ARMv8-M

  • RISCV32

  • RISCV64

Getting Started

  1. Install Rust toolchain and switch to nightly

Please refer to the official Rust installation guide for more details: https://www.rust-lang.org/tools/install

rustup toolchain install nightly
rustup default nightly

  1. Prepare NuttX build environment

Please ensure that you have a working NuttX build environment, and with the following PR merged or cherry-picked: - https://github.com/apache/nuttx-apps/pull/2487 - https://github.com/apache/nuttx/pull/15469

  1. Enable essential kernel configurations

Pleae enable the following configurations in your NuttX configuration: - CONFIG_SYSTEM_TIME64 - CONFIG_FS_LARGEFILE - CONFIG_TLS_NELEM = 16 - CONFIG_DEV_URANDOM

The rv-virt:nsh board using make as the build system is recommended for testing Rust applications as it has been verified to work with this configuration.

For rv-virt:nsh board, you should disable CONFIG_ARCH_FPU configuration since RISCV32 with FPU is not supported yet.

  1. Enable sample application

Please enable the sample application in your NuttX configuration: - CONFIG_EXAMPLES_HELLO_RUST_CARGO

  1. Build and run the sample application

Build the NuttX image and run it on your target platform:

qemu-system-riscv32 -semihosting -M virt,aclint=on -cpu rv32 -smp 8 -bios nuttx/nuttx -nographic

NuttShell (NSH) NuttX-12.8.0
nsh> hello_rust_cargo
{"name":"John","age":30}
{"name":"Jane","age":25}
Deserialized: Alice is 28 years old
Pretty JSON:
{
"name": "Alice",
"age": 28
}
Hello world from tokio!

Congratulations! You have successfully built and run a Rust application on NuttX.