In short - both, depending on the clients :)

Yes, new cars are evolving in terms of ECU architecture, and we are targeting small chips for two use cases:

First - as "edge components" get smarter - you still have small microcontrollers all over the car (for example - you need a local MCU and a complex PCB for running a headlight with dozens of LEDs with minimum wiring to a central command unit);

Secondly - you now have multi-core, multi-arhitecture controllers - and you need small OSs for some of these cores in order to run embedded apps efficiently.

Rust is certainly an attractive option, but the support for MCUs used in automotive seems weak (because the variety of LLVM backends is less than that of gcc). What do you think about this? Will you use a GCC-based Rust compiler (e.g. gccrs or rustc_codegen_gcc) or your own LLVM backend?

I’m not in automotive, but I am interested in this too. Which MCUs are you thinking of?

Not OP, but just a set of MCU arch common in automotive that you'd have to bend a bit to compile Rust for:

- Renesas RH 850/v850 - there is a gcc but not a llvm backend

- RL78 (I think this is kind of dieing though)

- Infineon Aurix Tricore (Hightec has a compiler for it)

- PowerPC was pretty popular but I did not see it that much lately.

I'd like to add ST's Stellar MCU's: https://www.st.com/en/automotive-microcontrollers/stellar-32...

Looks like Oxid has a demo using these proc's: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7041723...

We did have a demo using the Stellar MCU's. :)

But they weren't on my list because those have ARM cores and the support for those in Rust is quite good.

Thanks! Always interested in digging into details :)

There’s been a tremendous amount of interest in Rust for automotive over the past few years, but it’s a hard world to learn about unless you’re in it.

Hi! This is Daniel from OxidOS Automotive (stating this for disclaimer purposes).

Yes, our OS is based on TockOS, and our CEO (Alexandru Radovici) is #7 in the contributors list (https://github.com/tock/tock/graphs/contributors), with other colleagues contributing in the past years. Of course, we also push anything that we fix / that is useful for the general Tockos community upstream.