Consortium

Consortium is a Rust framework and build system for heterogeneous SoCs: systems where Linux-capable application cores work beside real-time Cortex-M, Cortex-R, or RISC-V cores. It turns the contracts between those processors into explicit, checked inputs instead of scattered board-specific glue.

A Consortium project starts with three things:

• a Consortium.toml manifest describing processors, memory, IPC, peripherals, and optional TEE, debug, and HMI services;
• a shared Rust crate containing the types that cross processor boundaries; and
• one endpoint crate for each participating runtime.

From those inputs, csti build validates the complete system, generates endpoint initialization code, builds its artifacts, and assembles a local dist/ tree for the target’s packaging flow.

Consortium.toml + shared types + endpoint crates
                        |
                 validate and lower
                        |
       generated Context, DTS, UIO, and build inputs
                        |
             Linux app + firmware + optional services
                        |
                  local dist/ tree

What Consortium provides

• Typed IPC. Allocation-free channels combine a transport, codec, direction, and message type. Shared-memory and UART transports use the same core contracts.
• Cross-core configuration. Chip databases validate memory placement, doorbell channels, visible cores, peripheral ownership, and generated Linux integration.
• Generated bring-up. Linux and firmware entry macros receive a ready Context instead of repeating transport, debug-ring, timer, and peripheral setup.
• Target integration. The builder emits remoteproc-ready firmware, device-tree and kernel inputs, a systemd unit, and a BitBake-ready staging tree.
• Optional services. OP-TEE contracts, shared-memory defmt logging, and Cog or Pocket HMI packaging integrate with the same project model.

Project status

Consortium is early-stage and its APIs are evolving. The i.MX 9 and STM32MP2 families are the active reference platforms. Prefer this user guide, current crate sources, and the melt-pot examples over older development notes when they disagree.

New readers should continue with Getting Started. Readers evaluating the design can begin with System Architecture.