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Zephyr Developer Summit – Day 1 Preview

 

To mark its 5th anniversary this year, the Zephyr Project is hosting the first-ever Zephyr Developer Summit virtually on June 8-10. Developers from around the world will convene online for three days to share knowledge, network with colleagues and advance Zephyr RTOS. The event is free to attend and the last day to register for the event is June 4. Register here: http://bit.ly/register-ZDS2021.

The first-ever Zephyr Developer Summit will offer community members a chance to learn more about the fastest growing RTOS in an informal educational environment. Check out some of the sessions that will be take place on Tuesday, June 8.

Day 1 Mini-Conferences:

Testing Mini-Conference (Tuesday, June 8 at 7am – 9am PDT / 4pm – 6pm CEST)

  • On-target testing with Twister and the process of results publishing – Maciej Perkowski, Nordic Semiconductor
    • The twister framework is constantly evolving to better serve the testing needs of Zephyr-based projects. During my presentation, I will bring the developers up to date with the current state of testing with Twister. I will present a short introduction on how to use Twister for on-target tests and will show how to use some new or less common features of the framework (e.g. quarantine). Validation of Zephyr performance on real hardware becomes an important part of QA. Contributors’ reports allow us to have a wider test scope of actual hardware running Zephyr applications. Therefore, during the presentation, I will also guide the contributors through the process of on-target results publishing.
  • Twister, a Powerful Test Runner for Zephyr OS Automation Testing – Peng Chen, Intel
    • As a powerful test runner, Twister is a critical part of zephyr automation testing framework. The Intel Zephyr team is using Twister to do daily testing upon 10+ hardware platforms with multiple architectures, collect test results and build CI testing. This presentation introduces the work process and fancy features of twister script, with the following perspectives:
        • Twister work process, including finding and building test cases, and get test results.
        • How twister judges a test case failure or success, and what the result “passed” “failures” “errors” means.
        • How to run twister command on a qemu or hardware platform.
        • How to enable twister automation testing on a new platform which doesn’t support common “west flash” command to transfer test images.
        • How to add a new test case and build the test case with twister script.
        • Future improvements
  • Visualizing Zephyr’s Health – Shihao Shen, Intel
    • Performance of the Zephyr OS on different platforms is always what we are concerned with. There are multiple indicators of Zephyr’s “health”, so it’s critical to present them in a coherent, visually immersive way. I would like to introduce two tools, Power BI and Grafana, that Intel Zephyr team have been using to better visualize different data of the Zephyr project.
    • The most useful aspect that comes with Power BI is its ability to integrate multiple tables from our database or local excel sheets into one single but elegant visualization. The usage of Power BI reduces manual input and hence largely improves the efficiency of a team on Zephyr. Before the introduction of Power BI, we spent hours manually filling out tables in PowerPoint, which was now automated by using Power BI to self-generate the same reports every time when data are updated on the database. The time spent has been significantly reduced from 5+ hours to 10 minutes per weekly report.
    • Grafana is another visualization platform. Compared to Power BI, Grafana is more light-weighted, user-friendly, and portable. Using Grafana to present data compensates some drawbacks of Power BI. We have added one more stage in the pipeline of our daily test server which sends the immediate test results to the database that Grafana uses for visualization. In this way, Grafana serves as a dynamic way to monitor the daily test results and parties interested can access it at any time, unlike Power BI as a more static presentation refreshed on a weekly basis.
    • Both visualization tools combined will benefit Zephyr in that it largely improves the team’s efficiency as well as successfully visualizes Zephyr’s test data.
  • Functional Safety Verification & Validation Test Case Development and the Challenges – Steven Wang, Intel 
    • Functional safety (FuSa) certification for IEC61508 standard is critical for such as automotive industry, industrial section, etc. According to IEC61508, verification and validation test cases are for verifying module/architecture design and validating safety requirements. Intel is working with TuV to get FuSa kernel parts of Zephyr certified.
    • This presentation shows how we develop the test cases for FuSa(Functional Safety) certification with examples. To meet FuSa specification, the test cases are designed and implemented with the techniques and measures defined in IEC61508. It turns out that the test cases help us to identify useless code and potential bugs. Moreover, we are seeing several challenges, such as how to define module and integration test cases, how to improve code coverage, and how traceability is set up between the test cases and the documents. This presentation illustrates the solutions to tackle the challenges.

Safety Mini-Conference (Tuesday, June 8 at 9:30am – 11:30am PDT / 6:30pm – 8:30pm CEST)

  • Conduct FMEA in the safety analysis of Zephyr – Enjia Mai, Intel
    • Safety Analysis is one of the critical parts of Functional Safety Certification to ensure safety-critical functions and functional threats analyzed for correct behaviors per safety requirements. This presentation is to introduce Failure Mode Effect Analysis (FMEA), which is being applied to Zephyr OS safety analysis. FMEA is one of several effective software architecture safety analysis methods for examining different levels of software architecture to ensure the currently designed software architecture can cope with the threats of hardware and software issues. In the presentation, an example will be used to illustrate the 6-step process of FMEA implementations which include: ensure and define the scope/architecture and component analysis/identity potential failure mode/identity potential consequences/identity possible causes and add control measures/update documents and requirements. Last but not least, the impacts and challenges with FMEA analysis will be discussed in the presentation.
  • The Status of Zephyr with respect to MISRA Compliance – Roberto Bagnara, BUGSENG and University of Parma
    • In this presentation, we will first introduce the MISRA C coding standard and its role in the development of hight-integrity systems. We will then illustrate the findings of an independent assessment of Zephyr with respect to MISRA compliance. We will highlight some of the challenges that have to be faced in order to achieve MISRA compliance for projects based on Zephyr.  We will conclude with a gap analysis based on MISRA Compliance:2020, offering insight (and soliciting discussion) on possible courses of action to ensure Zephyr meets the language-subsetting requirements of users operating in safety-critical domains.

Day 1 User/Ecosystem Track:

  • Zephyr Power Management 101 – Flavio Ceolin, Intel (Tuesday, June 8 at 7am – 8am PDT / 4pm – 5pm CEST)
    • This talk will discuss recent changes in the Zephyr power management infrastructure that attempts to fully support the capabilities of the various supported platforms. It will cover two major areas of this topic, System Power Management and Device Power Management, exploring how they are implemented, how they interact with each other and other subsystems and Kernel and finally how applications and integrators can change the default behavior.
  • USB support in Zephyr – Johann Fischer, Nordic Semiconductor (Tuesday, June 8  at 8am – 9am PDT / 5pm – 6pm CEST)
    • USB device support overview in Zephyr OS and ongoing/upcoming rework. What limitations do we have with current stack/driver-API and what do we want to improve. USB device controller drivers overview, Zephyr OS developer view on the HAL and controller designs. Host support. Testing. How can device stack and host stack benefit from each other?
  • Logging subsystem overview – Krzysztof Chruściński, Nordic Semiconductor (Tuesday, June 8  at 9:30am – 10:30am PDT / 6:30pm – 7:30pm CEST)
    • Logging takes a crucial part in any application. Not only as a debugging tool during the development phase but also in the field. Embedded systems gives additional challenge with real time requirements and limited resources. Logging subsystem attempts to meet the goals and overcome these challenges. Presentation will be an introduction to the logging subsystem with focus on the recent overhaul. It will go under the hood to explain internals and provide some practical recommendations for efficient logging.
  • A deep dive into the Zephyr 2.5 device model – Marti Bolivar, Nordic Semiconductor (Tuesday, June 8 at 10:30am – 11:30am PDT / 7:30pm – 8:30pm CEST)
    • Zephyr’s device model is the central abstraction underlying all of its drivers and many subsystems, along with core features such as the system clock. This talk is intended as an update to previous presentations on the subject, which describes the device model as it exists in Zephyr 2.5, along with a discussion of possible changes for 2.6 and beyond.

Day 1 Contributor Track:

  • Weaving Xtensa Yarns with Zephyr, Notes on an Idiosyncratic Architecture – Andy Ross, Intel (Tuesday, June 8 at 8am – 9am PDT / 5pm – 6pm CEST)
    • Zephyr is increasingly applied on the Cadence Xtensa architecture, whose non-traditional features and highly configurable IP pose problems at multiple levels for an OS attempting to exploit them. Includes brief overview of toolchain architecture, build- and run-time configuration choices, interrupt entry and exit in the presence of register windows, cache incoherence and control, and emerging work on MPU and MMU solutions.
  • Golioth: connecting Zephyr-based devices to the cloud – Jonathan Beri and Alvaro Viebrantz, Golioth (Tuesday, June 8 at 10:00am – 10:30am PDT / 7:00pm – 7:30pm CEST)
    • Golioth is an IoT platform built to reduce the friction for hardware devs to securely develop, connect and manage their devices from the cloud. Instead of dealing with servers and databases and a limited choice in components, Golioth provides device services for security, software updates, sensor data, and more; all that while letting you choose the hardware and connectivity that’s right for your product.
    • A core pillar of Golioth is the device SDK built on top of Zephyr. During this presentation you’ll get a high-level overview of Golioth and why we chose to build on Zephyr. Learn how we designed our module, integrated our services with the native networking stack, and how we were able to leverage powerful subsystems like MCUboot and logging. You’ll walk away understanding how Zephyr helped get us to market faster and why we’re so excited to be a part of the community!
  • Machine Learning with TensorFlow Lite Micro on Zephyr  – Lauren Murphy, Intel (Tuesday, June 8 at 10:30am – 11:30am PDT / 7:30pm – 8:30pm CEST)
    • Did you know that TensorFlow Lite Micro is now a Zephyr module? Come to this talk to learn the new Zephyr-centric way to build TensorFlow Lite Micro applications on Zephyr! This talk will introduce machine learning and TensorFlow before discussing the new module and guiding you through the process of developing, building and flashing a TensorFlow Lite Micro application on Zephyr with Visual Studio Code and Zephyr’s meta-tool, West.

** Schedule is subject to change. For the latest, please see  https://lists.www.zephyrproject.org/g/2021-Developer-Summit/calendar