Userspace Discussion

• How can we encourage participation in libtock-rs?
  • not a lot of activity to review (no contributions to review)
  • writing bindings for both C and Rust is more overhead (discourages). automation would help
  • more familiar with c than rust, don’t know what rust should look like
  • libtock-c and libtock-rs drivers look very different
  • automation for writing wrappers
• libtock-rs so hard to use with relocations
  • tockloader to do the relocation?
  • lack of relocations is a big barrier
  • can’t run multiple applications
• relocations for llvm in arm
  • arm: “there is support for PIC in LLVM and that is good enough” (wrong PIC for Tock)
  • perhaps more pestering from more users would help
  • lowrisc is stabilizing a ePIC standard for risc-v (and maybe arm) but moving VERY slowly
  • can we use libgcc backend as an option?
• typical pattern for tock drivers: allow, allow, subscribe, command
  • could almost do that in JSON
• libtock-rs: scope issues
  • libtock-rs not compatible with futures
• libtock-rs: sync and async versions?
• libtock-rs: copy-paste for drivers
• we don’t know if libtock-X drivers match the kernel
• how do we get open example applications?
  • tpm2 as an example
    • often requires special hardware
  • *** OpenSK as a better example
  • doable to get 90% of an example, last 10% kludges are harder to get upstreamed and fixed
• are outdated use cases useful?
• example: TodoMVC. general benchmark for web frameworks.
  • could example for tock be to start with a easily purchasable hardware platform and show the tock implementation
• can libtock-rs us FFI to work with something like OpenThread?