[Submission] Open source proposal: enhancement of embedded Rust libraries (testing)

[Dajamante]

Assignment Proposal

Title

Contributing to Rust Embedded ecosystem to improve developers experience. Submission on proposal #1587.

Names and KTH ID

• Johanna Löv ([email protected])
• Aïssata Maiga ([email protected])

Deadline

Task 1

Category

Contribution to open-source

Description

As anyone would say, Rust is hot 😉. The Rust Embedded ecosystem is also blooming to provide support to embedded platforms. For example The Knurling project is an open source project to automate Rust Embedded development by providing Rust-native level of support.

In Knurling

• probe-run is a custom runner to use Rust on embedded devices.
• defmt provides an effective logger for testing
• flip-link offers stack protection. When sensitive memory regions are reached, compilation fails instead of undefined behaviour.

flip-link needs some enhancements to improve developper experience:
rust-lld is a linker for GNU files. flip-link should accept the same files as rust-lld. Currently, some memory.x files (describing the memory) are not accepted by flip-link while being accepted by rust-lld. Meaning that developers must updates files by hand if they are incorrect.

This OSS contribution fits in CI/Testing as it automates necessary work that was precedently done manually (i.e. a human needed to check if files were formatted correctly to avoid failure), and support for testing programs.

Contribution

1. We added in total 7 tests to manage input that is currently accepted by rust lld, to make flip-link more resilient.
   Target PR

2. Fixed a bug about arithmetic operations handled incorrectly:
   Issue #65 Easy bug

Self-assessment

	Yes	No
bug: The contribution fixes bugs	Yes
documentation: The contribution improves documentation	Yes*
feat: The contribution adds new features	Yes
difficulty: The contribution is a difficult piece of engineering	Yes**
conversation: There is an interesting engineering conversation with the maintainers	Yes
merge: The contribution is merged in the main branch.	Yes

* Added documentation on the components.

** It is quite a hefty code base that we needed to dive in.
The change we got merged was not a difficult piece of engineering, more code reformatting. But understand and rewrite a parser is more challenging.

[dd2482-bot]

Readme is not correctly formatted
Need exactly: ['Assignment Proposal', 'Title', 'Names and KTH ID', 'Deadline', 'Category', 'Description']

Got: ['Brouillon', 'Assignment Proposal', 'Title', 'Names and KTH ID', 'Deadline', 'Category', 'Description', 'Description', 'Self-assessment']

[dd2482-bot]

Readme is not correctly formatted
Need exactly: ['Assignment Proposal', 'Title', 'Names and KTH ID', 'Deadline', 'Category', 'Description']

Got: ['Brouillon', 'Assignment Proposal', 'Title', 'Names and KTH ID', 'Deadline', 'Category', 'Description', 'Description']

[dd2482-bot]

Readme is not correctly formatted
Need exactly: ['Assignment Proposal', 'Title', 'Names and KTH ID', 'Deadline', 'Category', 'Description']

Got: ['Assignment Proposal', 'Title', 'Names and KTH ID', 'Deadline', 'Category', 'Description', 'Description']

[javierron]

Thanks for the submission!

[monperrus]

@Dajamante good progress here, the fix was merged. regarding the tests, ping me when there is progress on the PR (knurling-rs/flip-link#69)

[Dajamante]

@monperrus There is progress on the PR and all the tests we wrote are passing.
But during the discussion, it was identified that doing a recursive lexer and parser would be better for the project.
This got out of scope of the original PR for this task. While I am basically done with the lexer, I still need to integrate the lexer (https://github.com/Dajamante/linker_flip_link/blob/main/src/main.rs), to flip link, do a syntax tree, modify the flip link parser completely ....

[monperrus]

good, thanks.

[Dajamante]

@Dajamante good progress here, the fix was merged. regarding the tests, ping me when there is progress on the PR (knurling-rs/flip-link#69)

In the frame of this course, we want to do a final submission, and continue oss activities later on our own schedule.

[joloev]

@monperrus we have tried to reach you via email regarding this PR. This PR was intended to be our final submission of task 1. Unfortunately, as this was the beginning of the course and we were not yet familiar with the naming of PRs it was named submission and not Final submission. We have completed the task we proposed and was approved by a TA. Why have we not received a grade for task 1 on canvas? Should we simply rename it [Final Submission]?