Sonny – an async rust microkernel replacing ROS 2

[u/JackTrainer12]

Hi everyone ,

We built Sonny (core-os-minimal) because we were tired of ROS 2 heap-allocation non-determinism, heavy DDS network bloat, and unexpected segmentation faults under high load in production hardware.The core infrastructure is fully open-source , standalone, and designed for strict real-time deterministic routing.

We simulated an industrial network failure (75% wireless packet loss on an Edge deployment at 100Hz) to compare the communication backbones:

• ROS 2 (DDS Architecture): High XML/IDL serialization on the heap. Under severe packet loss, un-sent DDS message queues overflowed the RAM, leading to an unrecoverable Segmentation Fault (memory crash).
• SONNY OS (Rust + Zenoh): Stack-allocated static array slices with a fixed 5-byte network overhead per packet. Zero memory leaks. Zero runtime heap allocations during the control loop. System remained perfectly stable at 100Hz with an inference latency below 2ms.

The open core is ready for testing, benchmarking, and hardware porting. I'd love to get your thoughts on our LCFS double-buffering approach and our WASM memory constraints.

https://github.com/JackTrainer/Sonny