Tooling

This section contains details about the tools we'll be using.

cargo-generate OR git

Bare metal programs are non-standard (no_std) Rust programs that require some fiddling with the linking process to get the memory layout of the program right. All this requires unusual files (like linker scripts) and unusual settings (like linker flags). We have packaged all that for you in templates so that you only need to fill in the blanks such as the project name and the characteristics of your target hardware.

Our templates are compatible with cargo-generate: a Cargo subcommand for creating new Cargo projects from templates. You can also download the template using git, curl, wget, or your web browser.

The cortex-m template is available here.

cargo-binutils

cargo-binutils is a collection of Cargo subcommands that make it easy to use the LLVM tools that are shipped with the Rust toolchain. These tools include the LLVM versions of objdump, nm and size and are used for inspecting binaries.

The advantage of using these tools over GNU binutils is that (a) installing the LLVM tools is the same one-command installation (rustup component add llvm-tools-preview) regardless of your OS and (b) tools like objdump support all the architectures that rustc supports -- from ARM to x86_64 -- because they both share the same LLVM backend.

qemu-system-arm

QEMU is an emulator. In this case we use the variant that can fully emulate ARM systems. We use QEMU to run embedded programs on the host. Thanks to this you can follow some parts of this book even if you don't have any hardware with you!

OpenOCD

TODO What is this, what is it used for, and why are we using this tool?

GDB

Debugging is very important skill for embedded development as you may not always have the luxury to log stuff to the host console. In some cases, you may not have LEDs to blink on your hardware!

In general, LLDB works as well as GDB when it comes to debugging but we haven‘t found an LLDB counterpart to GDB’s load command, which uploads the program to the target hardware, so currently we recommend that you use GDB.