Berlin based technology consultancy specialising in the Rust programming language. We offer development, implementation, training and long-term support.

Ferrous Systems' focus on embedded systems and Rust development provides readers with  insights into building safe, reliable, and performant software for resource-constrained environments. From bare-metal programming to real-time operating systems, Ferrous Systems offers expertise and guidance for navigating the unique challenges of embedded development with Rust.

Ferrous Systems

A deep dive into hardware access patterns in Rust for bare-metal embedded systems. Covers three hardware access mechanisms: I/O ports, system/co-processor registers, and memory-mapped I/O (MMIO). Explains why volatile writes are required for MMIO, why creating Rust references to MMIO addresses is unsound, and how bitfields within registers are typically handled. Compares four major Rust MMIO abstraction crates — svd2rust, tock-registers, safe-mmio, and derive-mmio — evaluating each on API ergonomics, documentation discoverability, soundness, and AArch64 hypervisor compatibility. Also highlights the importance of running cargo doc to validate the developer experience of generated documentation.

Accessing Hardware in Rust