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Monthly Archive:: June 2024

Tock: a secure embedded operating system for microcontrollers

Tock is an embedded operating system designed for running multiple concurrent, mutually distrustful applications on Cortex-M and RISC-V based embedded platforms. Tock’s design centers around protection, both from potentially malicious applications and from device drivers. Tock uses two mechanisms to protect different components of the operating system. First, the kernel and device drivers are written in Rust, a systems programming language that provides compile-time memory safety and type safety. Tock uses Rust to protect the kernel (e.g. the scheduler and hardware abstraction layer) from platform specific device drivers as well as isolate device drivers from each other. Second, Tock uses memory protection units to isolate applications from each other and the kernel. ↫ Tock GitHub page We’ve never featured Tock on OSNews before, as far as I can tell, which seems odd considering it’s been around for a while. The most recent release stems from January 2023, so a short while ago, but that’s not too surprising considering the target audience of this embedded operating system. It’s licensed under either Apache or MIT.

This message does not exist

The act of discarding a message that does not exist must therefore do one of two things. It may cause the message contents to also cease to exist. Alternately, it might not affect the existence but only the accessibility of message contents. Perhaps they continue to exist, but discarding the message (which already did not exist) causes the copy operation to cease being invokable on the message contents (even though they do continue to exist). The story of existence has many mysteries. ↫ Mark J. Nelson The one question that can really break my brain in a way that is feels like it’s physically hurting – which it can’t, because, fun fact, there’s no pain receptors in the brain – is the question what exists outside of the universe? Any answer you can come up with just leads to more questions which just lead to more questions, in an infinite loop of possible answers and questions that the human mind is not equipped to grasp. Anyway, it turns out using Outook can lead to the same existential crises.