Panic Recovery in Rust-based Embedded Systems

Stack unwinding is a well-established approach for handling panics in Rust programs. However, its feasibility on resource-constrained embedded systems has been unclear due to the associated overhead and complexity. This paper presents our experience of implementing stack unwinding and panic recovery within a Rust-based soft real-time embedded operating system. We describe several novel optimizations that help achieve adequate performance for a flying drone with a CPU overhead of 2.6% and a storage overhead of 26.0% to recover from panics in application tasks and interrupt handlers.