Meet Linux's Little Brother Zephyr, a Tiny Open Source IoT RTOS (linuxgizmos.com)

DeviceGuru writes: The Linux Foundation has launched the Zephyr Project, to foster an open source, small footprint, modular, scalable, connected, real-time OS for IoT devices. The Zephyr Project's RTOS implements both a small footpoint microkernel and an even tinier nanokernel, and is the result of Wind River contributing its Rocket RTOS kernel to the Zephyr Project. (Wind's Rocket RTOS will now become a downstream commercial distribution based on Zephyr sources.) To get a sense of Zephyr's benefit, its nanokernel is said to be able to run in as little as 10KB of RAM on 32-bit microcontrollers, whereas a minimalistic Linux implementation like uClinux needs upwards of 200KB. The Linux Foundation hopes to see cross-project collaboration between the Zephyr and Linux communities. Technical details are at the Zephyr site.

Comments

Re:Does it really matter?

[asherh]

IoT devices will typically only have a few kB of RAM, so yes, it does matter. As a data point, I'm working with an ARM Cortex-M0 processor at the moment and it has a grand total of 128kB program memory (flash, so you can't use it for read/write data storage) and 16kB RAM. This is an entirely typical processor for this sort of IoT application.

Re:IoT

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't know why some idiot modded you down. It's a legitimate question.

IMHO it's pretty hard to define IoT in any way that doesn't include smartphones, unless the definition contains words like, "..but isn't a phone."

Or maybe it's cost. If it costs over $50, then it's not a thing: it almost certainly has a more specific name, like "phone" or "tablet" so that it doesn't have to fall back to using its general class of "thing."

(I used to think it might be defined by whether or not the device does any I/O directly with humans, but you don't want to rule out devices that have a keypad (e.g. a home alarm system), or a nice bright VFD (e.g. for a music player), or whatever. So it ain't about human I/O.)

Perhaps the ultimate wisdom, though, would be to not fight it. Maybe smartphones (and desktop PCs and RPis and TVs) are IoT. Think about all the topics and concerns (I mean complaints, of course) you hear about many IoTs today...

• They're insecure
• They try to lock you into some company's "ecosystem" by not using standards
• The shitty software that comes with it (that you have to use) does horrible things, like unconditionally send data out to somewhere on The Internet and can't be made to just talk to your own server

...it's pretty similar to list of reasons we tend to hate today's smartphones. And someone will come along and say "Oh yeah, this IoT device doesn't suck. I built it out of an Arduino" and you'll come back with "Yes, and Nokia made the N900 showing that smartphones don't have to suck either," but you might notice that here we are with the shit instead of the good stuff. You pretty much have to build something that doesn't suck: you can't buy anything good.

So when you advocate for better IoT, maybe you're fighting a better fight than you realized: to take back the phone from those clueless/evil (which is it?) motherfuckers in California and China.

Re:The obvious question.

[F.Ultra]

Unfortunately not since it's not Linux, Zephyr RTOS is a completely different kernel, it's Wind Rivers old Rocket RTOS that has been renamed.