It is becoming increasingly difficult for organizations to effectively process data through their system while restricted by outdated traditional operating systems; instead, real-time operating systems (RTOS) are driving past prior constraints to provide enhanced functionality. As innovators rapidly develop a myriad of sophisticated technologies that require constant streams of data to operate effectively, the importance of overhauled real-time operating systems has become central to the success of data-critical solutions and devices.
Satisfying consumer demands, last month The Zephyr Project announced a major milestone publicizing the use of Zephyr RTOS in building next-generation connected products and solutions from new Platinum member Baumer as well as a host of registering Silver members, namely, Infineon Technologies, Qualcomm Innovation Center, Inc., Percepio and Silicon Labs.
A Linux Foundation hosted open-source project, Zephyr unites the collaborative effort of a range of developers and users to build a safe, secure, and flexible real-time operating system optimized for resource-constrained devices featured across multiple architectures. Zephyr is built with an emphasis on broad chipset support, security, dependability, long term support releases alongside a growing open source ecosystem while providing an increasing set of software libraries that can be used across various applications and industry sectors including Industrial IoT, wearables, machine learning and more.
Kate Stewart, Vice President of Dependable Embedded Systems at the Linux Foundation, stated, “Zephyr fits where Linux can’t,” she continued. “It will help these new members with development, delivery, and maintenance across a wide variety of products and models. We look forward to working with our new members to improve the technology their products and solutions are based on.”
Offering vendors a customizable operating system that supports product longevity, security, and interoperability, the October 2021 release of Zephyr’s LongTerm Support (LTS) V2 aided a variety of product developers. Removing restraints that previously locked developers into a particular architecture, back-end platform, or cloud provider and will have the freedom to choose from an ecosystem of hardware. Included within LTS V2 is a breadth of enhancements, including:
- Bluetooth Audio, Direction Finding, and Mesh improvements
- Support for Bluetooth Advertisement PDU Chaining
- Added support for armclang / armlinker toolchain via toolchain abstraction
- Added support for MWDT C / C++ toolchain via toolchain abstraction
- Update to CMSIS v5.8.0 (Core v5.5.0, DSP v1.9.0)
- Support for M-Profile Vector Extensions (MVE) on ARMv8.1-M
- Improved thread-safety for Newlib and C++ on SMP-capable systems
- IEEE 802.15.4 Software Address Filtering
- New Action-based Power Management API
- USB Device Framework now includes all Chapter 9 defines and structures
- Generic System Controller (syscon) driver and emulator
- Linker Support for Tightly Coupled Memory in RISC-V
- Additional Blocking API calls for LoRa
- Support for extended PCI / PCIe capabilities improved MIS-X support
- Added Service Type Enumeration (STE) with mDNS / DNS Service Discovery
- Added Zephyr Thread Awareness for OpenOCD to West
- EEPROM now can be emulated in flash
- Added both Ethernet MDIO and Ethernet generic PHY drivers
Additionally, products based on the LTS release will benefit from a maintained code base throughout their development and deployment lifecycle. The LTS will serve as the baseline for the auditable version of Zephyr, which will benefit both the maintained LTS and development branches.
New Platinum member Baumer, one of the internationally leading companies for smart sensors, encoders, and digital cameras for industrial automation, joins other global companies, including Google, Intel, Nordic Semiconductor. In addition, Roman Kellner, Embedded Software Team Lead at Baumer, will join the Governing Board and its commitment to ensuring balanced collaboration and feedback that meets the needs of its community.
Zephyr Governing Board member and Marketing Committee Chair, Barna Ibrahim, stated. “The mission of the Governing Board is to cultivate an innovative relationship among stakeholders to advance the Zephyr Project’s support of new hardware, developer tools, sensors, and drivers while maximizing the functionality of devices that run applications developed using the Zephyr RTOS,” she continued, “we are ecstatic to welcome Roman to the board and look forward to working more closely with Baumer.”
“Baumer as a sensor manufacturer relies on the capabilities of microcontrollers in a wide performance range for our product portfolio,” said Roman Kellner. “Zephyr was chosen as our next sensor platform for its MCU vendor openness, reliability, high configurability, its added value compared to a pure RTOS scheduler, and the future ability to cover non-safe and safe products with the same code base. We are happy to contribute our expertise to attribute Zephyr RTOS as a high-performance sensor platform.”
Joining various other members, The Zephyr Project also welcomes new Silver members:
- Infineon, a world leader in semiconductor solutions that make life easier, safer, and greener;
- Qualcomm Innovation Center, a subsidiary of Qualcomm Technologies that focuses on enabling and optimizing open-source software that work with Qualcomm Technologies’ solutions;
- Percepio, a leader in visual trace diagnostics for embedded systems and IoT; and
- Silicon Labs, a leader in secure, intelligent wireless technology for a more connected world.
“The Zephyr Project is driving stability to developers, which allows them to focus on product innovation, and at Infineon, we are happy to be a part of helping customers drive differential value,” said Danny Watson, Principal Product Marketing Engineer at Infineon. “Infineon aims to be a key contributor to the underlying scalable goals of the Zephyr Project and to shape it into providing more performance and intelligent based Open-Source Software for Infineon’s PSoC™ 6 Microcontrollers.”
“The Qualcomm Innovation Center (QuIC) is proud to become a new member of the Zephyr Project community,” said Anthony Scarpino, Senior Director of Engineering at Qualcomm Canada ULC. “QuIC looks forward to contributing to the Zephyr Project to collaborate in building the best-in-class RTOS for secure, connected, resource-constrained devices. QuIC supports the building of micro-controller-based devices as part of the hardware and software ecosystems in upcoming products and sees participation in Zephyr as a path to world-leading innovative solutions.”
“At Percepio, we’ve long recognized the potential of Zephyr RTOS as the leading independent platform for small IoT devices where Linux isn’t an option, yet capable enough for complex embedded IoT/Edge applications,” said Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Percepio, Mike Skrtic. “The latest Zephyr release brings expanded support for software tracing, which facilitates debugging and allows for improved reliability, security, and performance of embedded systems. We’re pleased to have made significant contributions to the new tracing subsystem, to provide full kernel tracing support, enabling the high-end visual trace diagnostics Tracealyzer is known for.”
“We’ve had our eye on Zephyr for some time and are excited to officially be a member of this RTOS project,” said Benny Chang, Vice President, Platform, and Chief of Staff at Silicon Labs. “We appreciate the measures the Zephyr community is taking to build a reliable, well-tested RTOS for the IoT and look forward to ?connecting Zephyr users with ?our industry-leading hardware and connectivity solutions.”
The Zephyr Project is hosting its 2nd annual Zephyr Developer Summit on June 8-9 in Mountain View, California. The event will be in-person at the Computer History Museum, but it will also have a virtual element for attendees to stream from home. Learn more or register https://events.linuxfoundation.org/zephyr-developer-summit/.
Edited by
Luke Bellos
