satrs-book/src/constrained-systems.md

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+# Working with Constrained Systems
+
+Software for space systems oftentimes has different requirements than the software for host
+systems or servers. Currently, most space systems are considered embedded systems.
+
+For these systems, the computation power and the available heap are the most important resources
+which are constrained. This might make completeley heap based memory management schemes which
+are oftentimes used on host and server based systems unfeasable. Still, completely forbidding
+heap allocations might make software development unnecessarilly difficult, especially in a
+time where the OBSW might be running on Linux based systems with 500 MB RAM.
+
+A useful pattern used commonly in space systems is to limit heap allocations to program
+initialization time and avoid frequent run-time allocations. This prevents issues like
+running out of memory (something event Rust can not protect from) or heap fragmentation.
+
+# Using pre-allocated pool structures
+
+A huge candidate for heap allocations is the TMTC and  handling. TC, TMs and IPC data are all
+candidates where the data size might vary greatly. The regular solution for host systems
+might be to send around this data as a `Vec<u8>` until it is dropped. `sat-rs` provides
+another solution to avoid run-time allocations by pre-allocated static pools.
+
+These pools are split into subpools where each subpool can have different page sizes.
+For example, a very small TC pool might look like this:
+
+TODO: Add image
+
+A TC entry inside this pool has a store address which can then be sent around without having
+to dynamically allocate memory. The same principle can also be applied to the TM and IPC data.
+
+# Using special crates to prevent smaller allocations
+
+Another common way to use the heap on host systems is using containers like `String` and `Vec<u8>`
+to work with data where the size is not known beforehand. The most common solution for embedded
+systems is to determine the maximum expected size and then use a pre-allocated `u8` buffer and a
+size variable. Alternatively, you can use the following crates for more convenience or a smart
+behaviour which at least reduced heap allocations:
+
+1. [`smallvec`](https://docs.rs/smallvec/latest/smallvec/).
+2. [`arrayvec`](https://docs.rs/arrayvec/latest/arrayvec/index.html) which also contains an
+   [`ArrayString`](https://docs.rs/arrayvec/latest/arrayvec/struct.ArrayString.html) helper type.
+3. [`tinyvec`](https://docs.rs/tinyvec/latest/tinyvec/).
+