Community Growth:
Zephyr RTOS unites companies, developers and end users around the world to ensure balanced collaboration. The project is vendor-neutral and has a clear governance ensuring an open playing field for all contributors that helps us evolve to meet the needs of our community. This innovative relationship among stakeholders advances 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 OS.
Founded on open source principles and best practices learned from Linux, Zephyr’s governance has helped the project to stay relevant, and to keep attracting new contributors and users. In 2024, Zephyr had 1,100 unique contributors with more than 50% being first-time contributors.
In addition to contributors, the Zephyr Project added several members this year including Platinum member CARIAD and Silver members AC6, Alif Semiconductor, arm, Honda, Innovex, MicroEJ, Qt Group and STMicroelectronics.
The increased number of project members and contributors represents one more step in our open source journey and a stronger role in the advocacy, use and contribution across the Zephyr ecosystem. The top 3 companies who contributed the most to Zephyr in 2024 were Nordic Semiconductor, Intel, and NXP.
Technical Milestones:
Thanks to the community’s dedication, Zephyr achieved several technical milestones this year. Notably, the project surpassed 100,000 commits and added support for 150 new boards, including many very popular development platforms such as Raspberry Pi Pico 2, or the WCH CH32V003EVT—a board powered by $0.10 RISC-V MCU!
In July, we celebrated the launch of Zephyr 3.7, a significant milestone as it marks the next Long-Term Support (LTS) release. This version provides product makers with a solid foundation for building their next generation of products, offering reliable maintenance—particularly for security fixes—for the next 2.5 years.
With the LTS release and increased community contributions, the adoption of Zephyr has grown significantly. From wearables to home automation, embedded devices to animal trackers, and IoT gateways to industrial solutions, Zephyr is powering innovation across diverse industries. This year alone, we identified 15 new products running Zephyr. Check them out here: https://www.zephyrproject.org/products-running-zephyr/.
Security:
Zephyr is equipped with its own Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT), something that is quite unique in the open-source RTOS world. The PSIRT is responsible for handling security vulnerabilities in Zephyr, and ensuring that the community is informed about them in a timely manner. To that effect, we encourage anyone building products with Zephyr to subscribe to our Vulnerability Alert Registry.
Community Engagement:
In 2024, the Zephyr Project community actively connected, learned, and grew together through 15 Tech Talks with most popular topics including “IPC in Zephyr: to Zbus, or not to Zbus,” “Diving Into Zephyr’s New Hardware Model” and “Building Open Keyboards with ZMK & Zephyr.”
These talks served as a platform for in-depth knowledge sharing, technical innovation, and strengthening community collaboration.
Additionally, we held 17 community meetups across 15 cities in 8 countries, supporting collaboration and discussions.
From Brussels to Tokyo, Zephyr was represented globally at conferences and developer gatherings, bringing together enthusiasts and developers alike.
2024 has been a year of significant progress for the Zephyr Project. With key technical milestones like surpassing 100,000 commits, the launch of Zephyr 3.7 LTS, and support for 150 new boards, the project continues to evolve and address diverse industry needs. Our growing global community, active engagement through tech talks and meetups, and expanding membership demonstrate Zephyr’s increasing impact and adoption.
As we look ahead, we remain committed to driving innovation, strengthening security, and advancing collaboration across the ecosystem.
Thank you to everyone who contributed to this year’s success. Here’s to an even more impactful 2025!