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Not directly related but there are some Rust wrappers around EthetCAT libraries such as https://github.com/ethercat-rs/ethercat. EtherCAT is commonly used as a realtime fieldbus in industrial motion control, for example KUKA and Staubli use EtherCAT between their motion controller and the servo drives. KUKA uses Acontis as the EthetCAT master software, but I am not sure what motion libraries they use.
Makes sense. The EtherCAT master component can be loaded as a kernel module (for Etherlab), which I think is somewhat independent of the user code. The rust code interfaces with the driver through syscalls. There is some discussion about Rust with PREEMPT_RT here https://github.com/rust-embedded/linux-embedded-hal/issues/45 but it looks like it is still open.
Yeah, I think that is what something like https://www.toradex.com/computer-on-modules/apalis-arm-family/nxp-imx-8 is useful for, where it has a separate core. Or even on linux you can use isolcpus to get pseudo-isolation. There are also hardware hypervisors like Jailhouse (https://github.com/siemens/jailhouse) which can completely isolate hardware resources and I suppose might prevent the GPU from causing an issue with realtime task. But this definitely affects ease-of-use and probably requires a reduced feature set in the language (no dynamic allocations) and lots of unsafe code.
I provide systems with xenomai and etherlab installed and integrated with my motion system to local machine builders in Taiwan. This motion system is in Rust and run in real-time. But because most machine builders do not use Rust, also do not want to know real-time system either, I do not reveal the Rust API of this real-time system, instead I provide a client library for them. This client library is also written in Rust, but works as a C library. You can find it here and here 。In order to provide more flexibility, I also embedded a Forth language interpreter in the real-time system, so that I can build something like CNC. This interpreter is also developed in Rust.