Rust ESP32 Community Meeting 2025-01-16

[MabezDev]

The meeting is scheduled for 16th of January 2025 - 5 pm CET/GMT+1.

Join the meeting here

[jamessizeland]

Update on roadmap to esp-hal 1.0 (particularly I'm interested in esp-wifi and MCUboot)

Anything we can do better on interaction between esp-wifi and trouBLE?

[ivmarkov]

ESP-IDF <-> Baremetal feature parity. Are we there yet?

Background:

• Commercial customer going to production with ESP-IDF currently;
• The plan is to be able to migrate the firmware to baremetal in the near to mid-term future (i.e. 3-to-6-months from now?);
• Bootloader to remain the ESP-IDF one;
• Firmware buildable for the following targets:
  • -espidf (current prod target)
  • -none-elf (hopefully next prod target)
  • host (with fake/no-op I2C/SPI/etc. drivers (though ftdi maybe an option w. Linux) but with HTTP(s) & MQTT(s) connectivity) - for dev/testing

Customer & product not disclosed.

Area	Feature	ESP-IDF	Baremetal
HAL	SPI dynamic mode and baud setting	Supported	Supported (since ~ 2 months) However calculation of baud rate needs to be optimized, as it hits on each transaction - or the user needs to implement her own caching and only recalc if the baud rate really changed
HAL?	OTA support (with ESP-IDF bootloader or other)	Supported, incl. encryption and secure boot (see below)	Very rudimentary: only esp-idf-part - a serde for the IDF Partition Table; esp32c3-ota-experiment - things seem to be a bit hard-coded here; unclear if flash encryption is supported; bootloader-induced roolback? (CONFIG_BOOTLOADER_APP_ROLLBACK_ENABLE?); No esp_app_desc_t equivalent (image meta-data)? No way to verify the signature of a downloaded image without enabling secure boot (espsign might help here);
HAL?	Secure Boot (V2)	Supported (not ESP-IDF-specific)	Supported (except no option to verify signatures during OTA yet)
HAL?	Flash Ecryption (related to OTA, coredump and NVS topics)	Supported	Is reading/writing encrypted partitions supported? Need something like ESP-IDF's esp_flash_write_encrypted and esp_flash_read_encrypted
HAL?	CPU usage monitoring	Supported	?
HAL?	Heap usage monitoring	Supported	Mostly supported esp-alloc - missing a "free watermark" stat; UPDATE: Actually, maybe supported?
HAL?	Coredump (and saving in a coredump partition)	Supported	In progress: esp-rs/esp-hal#2672
Wifi (Provisioning / Captive Portal)	Seamless switching between AP and STA without destroying the IP stack (embassy-net / BSD sockets)	Supported	Requires tearing down the network stack, which does not play well with embassy-executor and its 'static tasks
Wider Ecosystem	NVS	Supported with ESP-IDF's native NVS lib	Supported with sequential-storage and ekv (I've tested the former incl. pre-generation of the NVS partition); however unclear how to support encrypted NVS
Wider Ecosystem	HTTP (client & server)	Supported (ESP IDF client and server, edge-http, reqwless, picoserve)	Supported (edge-http, reqwless, picoserve)
Wider Ecosystem	MQTT client	Supported (ESP IDF client)	Only partial (mqtt-rs for serde, but no usable real client - but see embassy-mqtt; maybe a start)
Wider Ecosystem?	TLS	Supported (natively in the IDF HTTP server & client and in the IDF MQTT client), esp-tls, raw bindings to mbedtls	In progress (esp-mbedtls; rustls?)
Wider Ecosystem	Sntp client	Supported (natively with an ESP-IDF Sntp client)	Maybe supported: sntpc?