Xous: A Pure-Rust Rethink of the Embedded Operating System
bunnie, Sean "xobs" Cross
39th Chaos Communication Congress (39C3): Power Cycles · Day 2 · Saal One
This talk introduces Xous, a groundbreaking embedded operating system (OS) written entirely in Rust, designed to address the pervasive memory insecurity in low-cost embedded and IoT devices. Developed by bunnie and Sean "xobs" Cross, Xous leverages a **Memory Management Unit (MMU)**, a feature largely absent from the widely adopted ARM Cortex-M architecture due to what the speakers term the "Linux tax." The core innovation of Xous lies in its ability to use hardware-level MMU protections to enforce Rust's robust memory safety semantics, effectively creating an OS where memory access violations are caught by the hardware itself.