Today we're announcing the release of Ferrocene 25.05.0, the latest update to our qualified Rust toolchain. This version includes improvements from upstream Rust and two new qualified targets.
Ferrocene is the first Rust compiler toolchain qualified for safety- and mission-critical systems. It is qualified to ISO 26262 (TCL 3/ASIL D), IEC 61508 (T3/SIL 4) and IEC 62304 (Class C) with TÜV SÜD.
Developed as an open-source, downstream Rust distribution, Ferrocene is 100% compatible with the main Rust compiler, allowing you to work seamlessly with both the compiler distributed by the Rust project and the Ferrocene toolchain.
What is new in Ferrocene 25.05.0
Ferrocene 25.02.0 includes changes from Rust 1.84, 1.85, and 1.86, such as new APIs, async closures and trait upcasting.
In addition, we have elevated two of our experimental targets to qualified status:
- Armv7E-M bare-metal (soft-float) (
thumbv7em-none-eabi) - Armv7E-M bare-metal (hard-float) (
thumbv7em-none-eabihf)
This means you can now use Rust on Arm Cortex-M4, Cortex-M4F, Cortex-M7, and Cortex-M7F processors in safety-critical contexts. These processors can be found as the primary compute element in a wide variety of industrial- and automotive-grade microcontrollers, but also as additional processing elements focused on safety or low-power efficiency within a larger System-on-Chip.
This release reaffirms our commitment to provide recent Rust compilers to the safety-critical world. Rust 1.86 was released on April 3, 2025 and Ferrocene customers can adopt those changes less than three months later.
Read the full release notes.
What is coming in future releases
As part of the 25.05 release, we have set the foundation for a more broadly applicable qualification method for embedded targets. Over the next few releases, we'll be rolling out qualification of the following targets:
armv7a-none-eabihf(Cortex-A7)armv7r-none-eabihf(Cortex-R5F)armebv7r-none-eabihf(Cortex-R5F, big-endian)armv8r-none-eabihf(Cortex-R52)thumbv7m-none-eabi(Cortex-M3)thumbv8m.main-none-eabihf(Cortex-M33)
If you are interested in using any of these targets in a qualified (or quality managed) way, please get in touch with us! We'd be happy to ensure your preferred target is qualified in our next release.
Work is ongoing with partners on library certification, particularly of libcore. If you need libcore certified for your use case, and want to be one of the first users, please let us know!
Available for purchase today!
With Ferrocene, users can develop high-assurance software from the start, without a massive upfront investment. Ferrocene is available for purchase today for €25/month or €240/year per user, providing access to all supported versions of Ferrocene (current and future) along with basic support.
Go to ferrocene.dev to purchase Ferrocene, or contact sales for more information on custom enterprise subscriptions.
Not sure if Ferrocene has the features you and your team need? You can also schedule a Why Ferrocene session by reaching out to our sales team.
