The Zephyr Community also announces the Release of 2.0.0 and Developer Boards Now Shipping with ZephyrOS

SAN FRANCISCO–  Oct. 8, 2019 –The Zephyr™ Project, an open source project at the Linux Foundation that aims to build a secure and flexible real-time operating system (RTOS) for the Internet of Things (IoT) announces its growing ecosystem with the addition of Eclipse IoT and the move up for long-time member Oticon to Platinum member. Additionally, the project announces the release of Zephyr 2.0.0 and that several popular developer boards are now shipping with Zephyr including Nordic Semiconductor’s Nordic Thingy91 and Adafruit’s Actinius Icarus.

In today’s technology landscape, fragmentation is the biggest challenge. Developers have a wide range of choices for platforms, boards and components and many of those don’t and can’t connect with each other. Zephyr offers a small memory footprint and a secure and flexible RTOS that extends functionality of IoT devices. It is a customizable, embedded open source platform that can be built for multiple hardware architectures with safety and security.

A Diverse and Active Community

Zephyr Project member companies include Antmicro, Foundries.io, Intel, Linaro, Nordic Semiconductor, NXP®, SiFive, Synopsys and Texas Instruments among others. Today, the project welcomes the Eclipse IoT as a new member and Oticon, which has been an active member for three years, recently upgraded to Platinum.

“The Eclipse Foundation’s IoT Working Group is home to many open source projects relevant to embedded Linux and Zephyr developers,” said Frédéric Desbiens, Program Manager for IoT and Edge Computing for the Eclipse Foundation. “Zephyr is one of the platforms supported by the Eclipse MRAA and Eclipse UPM abstraction libraries, which make constrained device applications device and OS independent. Moreover, Zephyr-based devices can integrate easily in IoT architectures leveraging therich set ofEclipse IoT components, such as Eclipse Leshan for device management and Eclipse hawkBit for software updates. At the Eclipse Foundation, we think that IoT developers should absolutely consider the Zephyr RTOS when designing solutions that involve constrained devices. Zephyr has a lot to offer: vendor-neutral governance, a long term support (LTS) branch, and its emphasis on security.” 

“At Oticon, we are pleased to have upgraded our Zephyr membership level to platinum,” said Finn Möhring, senior vice president of R&D at Oticon. “ We cherish the partnership with Zephyr being a professional open source community that supports us building world-class connectivity solutions for our hearing aids. Having launched the world’s first internet-connected hearing aids, we are excited to be part of the unique IoT ecosystem and we value the inspiration we get from the Zephyr ecosystem when developing solutions that help people with hearing loss connect their daily, modern life.”

“We are excited about the growth of the Zephyr ecosystem,” said Kate Stewart, Senior Director of Strategic Programs for the Linux Foundation.

“It’s a vibrant and diverse community driven to create an open source RTOS that fuels adoption and innovation. Their dedication has made a huge impact in the market and we’re now seeing many more boards planned for shipping with Zephyr and more products based on Zephyr.”

Zephyr 2.0.0

In April, the Zephyr project launched the 1.14 LTS release, which offers vendors a customizable operating system that supports product longevity, security and interoperability. Since then, the community has hit several additional milestones with more than 500 active contributors. In fact, last month Zephyr had 900 commits – which equates to 30 commits a day, or more than 1 commit an hour – to help prepare the newly launched Zephyr 2.0.0.

Key enhancements of Zephyr RTOS version 2.0.0 include new or enhanced support for:

• Both 32- and 64-bit architectures;
• ARM Cortex-R Architecture;
• SOCKS5 proxy, an Internet protocol that exchanges network packets between a client and server through a proxy server;
• Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP), a data link layer (layer 2) communications protocol used to establish a direct connection between two nodes; and
• UpdateHub, an end-to-end solution for large scale over-the-air device updates.

In addition, the first update of LTS – Zephyr 1.14.1 is being released, which provides a stable base for product development.

“The delivery of these two releases demonstrates the level of commitment from the Zephyr Project and its members to support a stable LTS base, as well as introduce new features and enhancements intended to make IoT development easier,” says Maureen Helm, senior software engineer at NXP and Technical Steering Committee Chair of the Zephyr Project. “These releases further solidify Zephyr OS as a leader in open source embedded development.”

Learn more about the Zephyr 2.0 technical details in this blog.

Technical Momentum

Nordic Semiconductor recently launched Nordic Thingy 91, an easy-to-use battery-operated prototyping platform for cellular IoT using LTE-M, NB-IoT and GPS. It’s ideal for creating Proof-of-Concept (PoC), demos and initial prototypes in your IoT development phase. It is packed with a multitude of sensors for motion, impact, air quality and includes a nRF52840 that can be used to connect to short range networks like Bluetooth LE, Thread or Zigbee. The nRF Connect SDK for cellular IoT is built with the Zephyr RTOS and features applications and examples that can be extended to build complete connected products. Using kconfig, the right combination of high level communication protocols and supporting drivers available in Zephyr can be included in any application.

Zephyr supports more than 160 board configurations spanning 10 architectures. For the complete list, visit the Zephyr Github page.

In addition to the increased board support, Zephyr technical momentum also includes being featured in a few getting started and study guides that offer development tips for creating open source solutions.

The  Bluetooth LE Developer Study Guide, created by the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG), uses Zephyr to help developers learn about Bluetooth Mesh from a variety of perspectives and gives them a range of projects they can leverage, whether they’re a smartphone developer or an embedded software engineer. Additionally, Zephyr v1.14.1 LTS Host and Mesh subsystems are now Bluetooth qualified. This means that a developer working on a Bluetooth product based on Zephyr v1.14.1 LTS release can use the available QDIDs to simplify their Bluetooth qualifications.

The RISC-V Getting Started Guide, in partnership with Antmicro, is a new resource intended to help members of the RISC-V Foundation and the Zephyr  communities quickly get started using the RTOS on the RISC-V architecture.

“At Antmicro, we strongly advocate openness and interoperability. As supporters and active contributors to Zephyr, we are happy to see the ecosystem expanding and look forward to the technology synergies offered by Zephyr and RISC-V on many fronts, as stressed in the RISC-V Getting Started Guide we kickstarted,” said Michael Gielda, VP Business Development at Antmicro.

The Zephyr Project will be on-site at the Linux Foundation’s Embedded Linux Conference Europe in Lyon, France on October 28-30 with 13 presentations and a Mini-Summit. Learn more about the sessions and add them to your schedule:https://www.zephyrproject.org/event/embedded-linux-conference-europe/.

To learn more about the products that use Zephyr RTOS, visit the Zephyr website and blog.

About the Zephyr™ Project

The Zephyr Project is a small, scalable real-time operating system for use on resource-constrained systems supporting multiple architectures. To learn more, please visitwww.zephyrproject.org.

About the Linux Foundation

Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation’s projects are critical to the world’s infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, and more.  The Linux Foundation’s methodology focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us atlinuxfoundation.org.

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The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII) awards Zephyr with Gold Best Practice Badge for driving security, quality and stability of open source software

SAN FRANCISCO – April 17, 2019 –The Zephyr™ Project, an open source project at the Linux Foundation that aims to build a secure and flexible real-time operating system (RTOS) for the Internet of Things (IoT), today announced a technical milestone with the first Long Term Support (LTS) release. The Zephyr 1.14 LTS release, which has been developed by the diverse Zephyr community of almost 500 contributors, will offer vendors a customizable operating system that supports product longevity, security and interoperability.

In today’s technology landscape, developers have a plethora of choices for platforms, boards and other components. They are challenged to create secure products that integrate with other proprietary and legacy solutions. With the Zephyr LTS, developers aren’t locked into a particular architecture, back-end platform or cloud provider and will have the freedom to choose from an ecosystem of hardware.

“The Zephyr LTS release allows product developers to focus on innovation rather than the common and standard operating system layers,” said Anas Nashif, the Zephyr Project Chair of the Technical Steering Committee (TSC). “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.”

The LTS code release represents a major milestone on the Zephyr technical roadmap. One of the goals of the LTS is to stabilize the Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) so that a consistent foundation for applications is created for the operating system. Other key features for this release include:

• Support for more than 160 board configurations spanning 8 architectures
• A reimplemented Timing system that simplifies drivers and reduces typical kernel build size by hundreds of bytes
• A new experimental BLE split software controller for supporting multiple BLE radio hardware architectures
• Major updates to the logging and shell subsystem with support for multiple back-ends, integration of logging into the shell, and delayed log processing
• A new west tool for managing multiple repositories and enhanced support for flashing and debugging
• Added support for application user mode, application memory partitions, and hardware stack protection in ARMv8-m

The Zephyr TSC is actively working towards safety certifications with the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). The project plans to submit key parts of the Zephyr kernel and operating system services based on the LTS release for safety certification. These certifications are important as they indicate a product has undergone careful review and testing and is deemed trustworthy in safety-related systems. More information about the plans for functional safety can be found in this blog.

Additionally, the Zephyr Project earned the Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII) Gold Best Practice Badge, which means it is following best practices and conformance in driving secure software development in open source. The Core Infrastructure Initiative is a collaborative, pre-emptive program and approach for strengthening cyber security that has been adopted by more than 2000 projects. The CII Best Practices Badge is a rigorous assessment of an open source project’s processes and infrastructure. The Zephyr Project is one of three open source projects that has achieved the gold badge status.

More than 160 Board Configurations Supported

Hosted by the Linux Foundation, the Zephyr Project aims to establish a neutral community where silicon vendors, Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs), Original Design Manufacturer (ODMs) and Independent Software Vendor (ISVs) can contribute technology to reduce the cost and accelerate time to market for developing the billions of IoT devices. Project member companies include Antmicro, Foundries.io, Intel, Linaro, Linino.org, Nordic Semiconductor, NXP, Oticon, SiFive, Synopsys and Texas Instruments among others.

Zephyr offers the smallest memory footprint and a secure and flexible RTOS that extends functionality of IoT devices. It is a customizable, embedded open source platform that works with multiple hardware architectures. The dedication and talent of the growing Zephyr technical community has resulted in rapid expansion in board support as well as attracting an average of 20 new contributors each month.

Currently, Zephyr supports more than 160 board configurations comprising of different architectures including: ARC, ARM, NIOS II, RISCV32, x86, x86_64 and XTENSA processor families. For the complete list of boards and details, visit the Zephyr Github page.

“Community driven Zephyr development is creating an open source ecosystem that is fueling IoT innovation and seeing exciting new products emerging,” said Kate Stewart, Senior Director of Strategic Programs at the Linux Foundation. “We’re excited to see the flexibility and functionality of the Zephyr RTOS being used in award-winning products such as smart wearables from ProGlove and Intellinium, and new intelligent tagging systems like Adero.” 

To learn more about the products that use Zephyr RTOS, visit the Zephyr website and blog.

About the Zephyr™ Project

The Zephyr Project is a small, scalable real-time operating system for use on resource-constrained systems supporting multiple architectures. To learn more, please visitwww.zephyrproject.org.

About the Linux Foundation

Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation’s projects are critical to the world’s infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, and more.  The Linux Foundation’s methodology focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us atlinuxfoundation.org.

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The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

Six New Industry and Academic Members Join the Open Source group to Create a Secure and Safe IoT RTOS

SAN FRANCISCO – August 9, 2018 – The Zephyr™ Project, an open source project to build a real-time operating system (RTOS) for the Internet of Things (IoT), today announced growth of its IoT ecosystem with support for more than 100 developer boards and the addition of six new members. These industry and academic leaders include Antmicro, DeviceTone, SiFive, the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, The Institute of Communication and Computer Systems (ICCS) and Northeastern University.

Hosted by The Linux Foundation, the Zephyr Project aims to establish a neutral community where silicon vendors, Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs), Original Design Manufacturer (ODMs) and Independent Software Vendor (ISVs) can contribute technology to reduce the cost and accelerate time to market for developing the billions of IoT devices.

Over 100 boards supported

The dedication and talent of the growing Zephyr technical community has resulted in a significant expansion in board support as well as attracting more new developers each month. At launch in 2016, Zephyr was supported on only four boards including Arduino 101, Arduino Due, Intel® Galileo™ Gen 2 and the FRDM-K64F Freedom development board from NXP® Semiconductors. Zephyr now supports more than 100 boards comprising of different architectures: ARM, x86, ARC, NIOS II, XTENSA, and RISCV32 processor families. For a complete list of boards and details, visit http://docs.zephyrproject.org/boards/boards.html.

Growing Ecosystem

In addition to this technical milestone, the Zephyr IoT ecosystem recently added new members including Antmicro, DeviceTone, SiFive, the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, The Institute of Communication and Computer Systems (ICCS) and Northeastern University. These companies join industry leaders such as Intel, Linaro, Nordic Semiconductor, NXP,  Oticon, Synopsys, and others.

“Developers have many choices when it comes to platforms. Zephyr offers the smallest memory footprint and a secure and flexible RTOS that extends functionality of IoT devices,” said Anas Nashif, Chair of the Zephyr Project Technical Steering Committee and a Software Engineer at Intel’s Open Source Technology Centre. “We are excited to welcome these member companies into our IoT ecosystem and look forward to collaborating with them to create and support a customizable, embedded open source platform.”

In addition to these new members, the Zephyr technical community recently welcomed Thea Aldrich, a longtime open source participant, as a Project Evangelist and Developer Advocate. She will be an active contributor to the technical roadmap, teaching Zephyr to new developers raising awareness of the project and coordinating communities.

She joins the already robust technical community that has more than 300 contributors on Github collaborating daily to create patches and help advance and manage new versions of Zephyr code that easily integrates with embedded devices regardless of architecture.

“A few years ago, I used Zephyr OS to solve many of the technical issues I was encountering with a wearables solution I created,” said Thea Aldrich, Zephyr Project Evangelist and Developer Advocate. “Zephyr’s ease of use and scalability helped me with my solution and I was welcomed into this highly passionate open source community. Needless to say, I stumbled upon something more than just an RTOS and I could not be happier to have the opportunity to contribute to this community.” Learn more about Thea here.

New Member Quotes:

“Antmicro is joining the Zephyr Project to confirm its long-term commitment to this community-driven and security-oriented RTOS, which we see as a de-facto standard for the next generation IoT systems,” said Michael Gielda, VP Business Development at Antmicro. “Zephyr is an especially good choice for devices based on new open architectures such as RISC-V, and developed with new methodologies using tools such as Renode, Antmicro’s multi-node simulation framework for IoT security, quality and interoperability testing, which is already a recommended Zephyr tool in use by our Zephyr customers worldwide.”

“DeviceTone is pleased to join the growing Zephyr community,” said Philip DesAutels, Chief Product Officer of DeviceTone. “We plan to leverage Zephyr’s ease of use, flexibility and network to create secure embedded devices under our DeviceTone solutions. We look forward to collaborating with the IoT ecosystem and sharing our expertise with simplified connected product development.”

“The I-SENSE Group of ICCS research addresses the evolving connectivity needs of embedded devices including mobility communication services, intelligent transport systems, environmental monitoring, applications for next generation emergency services and infrastructure monitoring for foundation of future smart cities,” said Dr. Angelos Amditis, Research Director, I-SENSE Group of ICCS. “We believe the Zephyr Project is an accelerator of hyper-connectivity among embedded devices, network components and the cloud. As such, we’re excited to be part of the project and working with members who are interconnected across various smart domains of a greater IoT ecosystem.”

“At Northeastern University, we have a large group of researchers working on cybersecurity and privacy,” said Long Lu, Assistant Professor of Computer Science for Northeastern University. “IoT security is one of the focused research areas and we recognize Zephyr’s leading role in building secure IoT OS. Joining the project allows us to timely transfer our research outcome to practice and stay informed of real-world security problems facing IoT devices.”

“RISC-V is about creating open source platforms for the entire world to collaborate on, but hardware doesn’t exist without software,” said Jack Kang, VP of Product at SiFive. “Given SiFive’s leadership role in the RISC-V ecosystem, joining the Zephyr Project is a natural step, as the vision of a well-supported, robust open-source RTOS is important to the RISC-V revolution.”

About the Zephyr™ Project

The Zephyr Project is a small, scalable real-time operating system for use on resource-constrained systems supporting multiple architectures. To learn more, please visit www.zephyrproject.org.

About The Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation is the organization of choice for the world’s top developers and companies to build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and industry adoption. Together with the worldwide open source community, it is solving the hardest technology problems by creating the largest shared technology investment in history. Founded in 2000, The Linux Foundation today provides tools, training and events to scale any open source project, which together deliver an economic impact not achievable by any one company. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org.

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How do you develop and sustain an operating system primed for the continuously evolving nature of the internet of things? You model it, in part, on the highly successful Linux platform, which is exactly the tactic of the Zephyr Project, an open, real-time operating system overseen by the nonprofit Linux Foundation along with a variety of other big-name industry players.

Read more at TechTarget

Zephyr Project aims to bring real-time to the IoT
For as little as 8kB IoT device developers can have a real-time operating system in their design, thanks to the Zephyr Project. This open-source, community-created code is available through the Linux Foundation under the permissive Apache 2.0 license to make it as uncomplicated to use and deploy as possible.

Read more at eetimes

With more than 25 billion Internet connected things predicted to hit the market by 2020, the “Internet of Things” is evolving from a promise to an everyday reality. Whether it’s how we control our energy usage or secure our homes, smart devices are changing the world we live in and how we live.

Read more at Linux.com

Community developing a secure, open source real-time operating system for the Internet of Things

SAN FRANCISCO, August 8, 2016 – The Zephyr™ Project, an open source collaborative effort to build a real-time operating system (RTOS) for the Internet of Things (IoT), announced today that Linaro Ltd, the collaborative engineering organization developing open source software for the ARM® architecture, has joined the project as a Platinum member. Linaro is a global organization whose 35 members include leading companies from many industry segments.

Linaro joins founding members of the project: Intel® Corporation (including its acquired business groups Altera Corporation and Wind River), NXP Semiconductors N.V. (including its recent merger with Freescale) and Synopsys, Inc.

As a Platinum member, Linaro will help drive Zephyr specifications and initiatives, and contribute toward the development of the Zephyr Project’s goal of becoming the premier multi-architecture open source RTOS for IoT. Linaro’s participation will especially help to ensure quality ARM® architecture support in the Zephyr Project.

“Since its establishment, we have worked closely with The Linux Foundation on many common projects of interest to Linaro and its members. These have been exclusively focused on ARM Cortex-A based systems,” said George Grey, Linaro CEO. “Joining the Zephyr Project signals Linaro’s interest in reducing MCU OS fragmentation and helping enable ARM Cortex-M based MCUs in the Internet of Things and embedded space. We see Zephyr as a unifying project, and as an architecture-neutral RTOS. Linaro will use Zephyr as the basis for developing and testing technologies applicable to the IoT and embedded markets.”

“IoT promises new levels of connectivity for embedded technologies,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director of The Linux Foundation. “Linaro is not only a global leader in embedded devices, but one that deeply understands the power of open source. I’m excited to see how their collaboration with other members of the Zephyr Project impacts IoT.”

About the Zephyr™ Project

The Zephyr Project is a small, scalable real-time operating system for use on resource-constrained systems supporting multiple architectures. To learn more, please visit www.zephyrproject.org.

The Zephyr Project is hosted by The Linux Foundation, the organization of choice for the world’s top developers and companies to build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and commercial adoption. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org.

About Linaro

Linaro is leading collaboration on open source development in the ARM ecosystem. The company has over 200 engineers working on consolidating and optimizing open source software for the ARM architecture, including developer tools, the Linux kernel, ARM power management, and other software infrastructure. Linaro is distribution neutral: it wants to provide the best software foundations to everyone by working upstream, and to reduce non-differentiating and costly low level fragmentation. The effectiveness of the Linaro approach has been demonstrated by Linaro’s growing membership, and by Linaro consistently being listed as one of the top five company contributors, worldwide, to Linux kernels since 3.10.

The full scope of Linaro engineering work is open to all online. To find out more, please visit http://www.linaro.org.

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The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

Media Contact:
Laura Kempke
The Linux Foundation
lkempke@linuxfoundation.org

Earlier this year, the Zephyr project was launched to a world justifiably skeptical of self-anointed “secure” technologies, jaded by the sloganeering of all things IoT, and seemingly saturated by the proliferation and fragmentation of no-size-fits-all microcontroller RTOS platforms. Given those circumstances it is only reasonable that I find myself asked what we could possibly be thinking in launching a new “secure IoT RTOS platform.” Or, should I say, why are we launching yet another one.

Read more at Design News