Red Hat's in-vehicle operating system gained a TÜV SÜD-qualified Rust toolchain

Red Hat and Ferrous Systems announced a collaboration on October 13 to bring Rust to applications for Red Hat In-Vehicle Operating System, with Ferrocene — the Berlin company’s Rust toolchain — already supporting the platform on a qualified aarch64-rhivos2-linux-gnu target. That puts a memory-safe language into the toolchain for a commercial vehicle operating system, and engineering teams can develop and test applications against it now, the companies said.

Ferrocene is qualified for safety-related development according to ISO 26262 up to ASIL D, alongside a certified subset of Rust’s core library for ASIL B workloads, and also carries IEC 61508 SIL 3 and IEC 62304 Class C qualification. Ferrous Systems began the project in 2019 to bring Rust to safety- and mission-critical industries; the release described what it has become as a quality-managed, TÜV SÜD-qualified, open-source Rust toolchain. Ferrocene 26.05, published on July 28, is the version that carries the Red Hat target; what the two announced in October is the joint solution built around it and its timetable.

Full general availability of the joint solution is planned for the second half of 2027, the companies said, aligned with safety-certified releases of the operating system. The release also pointed to mixed Rust, C and C++ interoperability, so existing code can be migrated gradually rather than rewritten, and published target guidance on a public documentation site.

Francis Chow, Red Hat’s vice-president and general manager for in-vehicle operating system and edge, and Florian Gilcher, managing director of Ferrous Systems, were named in the announcement. No commercial terms were stated. Red Hat’s parent IBM filed nothing with the SEC on the collaboration, and Ferrous Systems is privately held in Germany, registered at Charlottenburg as HRB 200196 — a register that carries no disclosure duty reaching terms of this kind.