Deploying Rust in Existing Firmware Codebases

This Android team blog outlines a practical, incremental approach to bringing memory-safe Rust into existing low-level firmware, prioritizing new and security-critical components. It covers creating drop-in Rust shims for C APIs, operating in no_std environments, selecting and porting crates, generating FFI bindings with bindgen, wiring panic handlers and allocators, handling fallible allocations, defining custom targets, and optimizing builds (e.g., LTO). The goal is to reduce memory-unsafe vulnerabilities in large legacy firmware while maintaining performance and enabling a smoother migration path.