rust News - CNX Software - Embedded Systems News

April 13, 2026 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 6 Comments

Linux 7.0 Release – Main changes, Arm, RISC-V, and MIPS architectures

Linus Torvalds has just released Linux 7.0 on LKML: The last week of the release continued the same “lots of small fixes” trend, but it all really does seem pretty benign, so I’ve tagged the final 7.0 and pushed it out. I suspect it’s a lot of AI tool use that will keep finding corner cases for us for a while, so this may be the “new normal” at least for a while. Only time will tell. Anyway, this last week was a little bit of everything: networking (core and drivers), arch fixes, tooling and selftests, and various random fixes all over the place. Let’s keep testing, and obviously tomorrow the merge window for 7.1 opens. I already have four dozen pull requests pending – thank you to all the early people. Linus This follows the Linux 6.19 release about two months ago, which brought us PCIe link encryption and […]

March 26, 2026March 26, 2026 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 10 Comments

RuView project leverages ESP32 nodes for WiFi-based presence detection, pose estimation, and breathing/heart rate monitoring

RuView is an open-source “WiFi DensePose” implementation leveraging multiple ESP32 nodes to turn WiFi signals into real-time human pose estimation, vital sign monitoring, and presence detection without relying on video cameras. WiFi DensePose is a sensing technique, first explored in academic research, that leverages WiFi signals to reconstruct human pose. RuView implements this technique in Rust or Python, and relies on your WiFi router and several ESP32 nodes to track body pose, detect breathing rate, and measure heart rate even through walls. As we’ll discuss below, this project has its own controversy, as some claim it’s fake. The solution relies on Channel State Information (CSI) disturbances caused by human movement to reconstruct body position, breathing rate, heart rate, and presence in real time using “physics-based signal processing and machine learning”. That obviously means you need CSI-capable hardware, and not all consumer WiFi nodes implement it. The project description lists various […]

March 4, 2026March 4, 2026 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 14 Comments

Dabao board features open-source hardware Baochip-1x RISC-V MCU (Crowdfunding)

An open-source hardware board usually features a closed-source microcontroller or processors, but the Dabao evaluation board goes further with the open-source Boachip-1x MCU, whose RTL files are available. It’s also manufactured in such a way that it is inspectable with the Infra-Red, In Situ (IRIS) technique, so users can look at the silicon and confirm they’ve got the right chip in a non-destructive way. Baochip-1x is a “general-purpose” microcontroller with a 350 MHz Vexriscv RV32-IMAC CPU core, a BIO accelerator for I/Os with four 700MHz PicoRV RV32-EMC CPU cores, 4MB of ReRAM, 2MB SRAM, a USB interface, various other I/Os, and hardware secure elements such as cryptography accelerators, key stores, one-way counters, true random number generation, and hardware attack countermeasures such as glitch sensors and a security mesh. The Dabao board itself is pretty basic with the microcontroller, two 16-pin headers for I/Os, a USB-C port for power and programming, […]

January 28, 2026January 28, 2026 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

Ariel OS – A Rust RTOS for IoT microcontrollers

Ariel OS is a new RTOS for microcontrollers written in Rust with support for popular hardware architectures (Arm Cortex-M, ESP32, RISC-V) and boards from Espressif, Nordic Semi, Raspberry Pi, and STMicroelectronics. Ariel OS is built on top of Embassy Rust framework and embedded-hal Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) for embedded systems, and adds several OS functionalities and a multi-core capable scheduler. It is mainly designed for secure, memory-safe, networked applications on microcontrollers. The developers further describe Ariel OS as follows on the project’s website: Ariel OS follows an approach whereby it simultaneously integrates a curated ecosystem of libraries (available via crates.io), and adds missing operating system functionalities as depicted below. Such functionalities include a preemptive multicore scheduler, portable peripheral APIs, additional network security facilities, as well as a meta-build system to bind it all together. As a result, a low-power IoT developer can focus on business logic sitting on top of […]

January 24, 2026 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

FOSDEM 2026 schedule – Embedded, RISC-V, Robotics, Rust, Open Hardware, and more

FOSDEM 2026 will take place on January 31-February 1, with thousands of developers meeting in Brussels to discuss open-source software & hardware projects. The free-to-attend “Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting” gets more traction every year, and in 2026, there will be at least 1,113 speakers, 1,016 events, 70 tracks, and potentially close to 10,000 attendees. As usual, I’ll create a virtual schedule with sessions most relevant to the topics covered on CNX Software from the “Embedded, Mobile and Automotive” and “Open Hardware and CAD/CAM” devrooms, but also other devrooms, including “RISC-V”, “Robotics and simulation”, and “FOSS on Mobile”, among others. I’m aware some of the talks overlap by a couple of minutes or so… FOSDEM 2026 Day 1 – Saturday, January 31 10:40 – 11:15 – RISC-V Vector optimisations in FFmpeg by Rémi Denis-Courmont FFmpeg is the most versatile multimedia codec and format support library, and was […]

January 12, 2026January 11, 2026 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

Xibo open-source digital signage solution now works with Raspberry Pi 5 thanks to the Arexibo project

Xibo digital signage solution is now compatible with the Raspberry Pi 5 thanks to Axeribo, an unofficial alternative to the digital signage player for Xibo, that is implemented in Rust, and designed for Linux platforms. Long-time readers of CNX Software may remember that I played around with the Xibo open-source digital signage player many years ago (2011-2012). I notably managed to run Xibo for Arm in QEMU, test Xibo digital signage in the Raspberry Pi emulator, and even try it on real hardware: a MeLE A1000 Android TV box to which I installed Linux. It kind of works, but without hardware video decoding and no 3D graphics acceleration, performance was rather on the low side. I eventually stopped playing around with Xibo Arm Linux once Xibo for Android was released in late 2012, and the developers decided to drop support for the Linux client (although they relaunched it in 2019 […]

December 3, 2025December 3, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

Tyr – A Rust GPU driver for Arm Mali GPUs

One interesting addition to the just-released Linux 6.18 kernel is the Tyr Rust GPU driver for CSF-based Arm Mali GPUs, which is a port of the mature Panthor C GPU driver merged into Linux 6.10. It was developed by Collabora in collaboration with Arm and Google. Tyr aims to implement the same userspace API offered by Panthor, so that it can eventually be used as a drop-in replacement in the company’s PanVK Vulkan driver. After several years, the Tyr Rust driver might replace the Panthor C driver, but in the meantime, Panthor will keep being used since it is more mature and conformant with OpenGL ES 3.1 since July 2024. The work on Tyr is fairly advanced, and Collabora provided an update at the end of November. The key takeaway is that the Tyr (prototype) driver works with GNOME, Weston, and even full-screen 3D games like SuperTuxKart while matching the […]

December 1, 2025December 12, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 8 Comments

Linux 6.18 LTS release – Main changes, Arm, RISC-V, and MIPS architectures

Linus Torvalds has just announced the release of Linux 6.18 on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML), which will likely become the next LTS kernel [update: it’s now official]: So I’ll have to admit that I’d have been happier with slightly less bugfixing noise in this last week of the release, but while there’s a few more fixes than I would hope for, there was nothing that made me feel like this needs more time to cook. So 6.18 is tagged and pushed out. Most of the last-minute fixes are minor fixes to drivers, with some random noise elsewhere (bluetooth, ceph, afs..). Nothing strikes me as standing out, but hey, there’s a shortlog appended if you want to see the details. And this obviously means that the merge window will open tomorrow, and I already have three dozen pull requests pending. Thanks. And as I already mentioned a couple of […]