Blog

You Merged My Sister’s PR — Zephyr Podcast #021

By February 13, 2026No Comments

Join Discord // #podcast at https://chat.zephyrproject.org!

Subscribe to the podcast on your favorite platform:

The summary below was automatically generated using the assistance of AI tools.

Episode Summary

  • Discord “Teen-by-Default” Setting: Discord rolled out a new user setting that marks all accounts as “teen” by default, likely in response to countries restricting minors’ access to social media. Some community members in servers with age-restricted channels may need to verify their identity via face scan or document upload, which has been controversial. The Zephyr Discord remains unaffected for typical use, and the hosts remind listeners that Discord is not the primary communication channel for the project — GitHub Issues and Discussions are preferred for technical topics, bug reports, and RFCs since they are searchable and indexed.
  • AI/LLM Use in Contributions: Growing concern in the community about AI-generated code submissions and comments appearing on GitHub PRs and issues. The signal-to-noise ratio may be shifting, and the project will likely need guidelines around AI-assisted contributions. The hosts note the challenge of distinguishing AI-generated content from non-native English speakers using translation tools, and emphasize that the quality of the code is what ultimately matters.
  • Linux v7 Incoming: The next Linux kernel release will bump to version 7. As a reminder, major version bumps in Linux (and in Zephyr) don’t carry semantic versioning meaning and there’s no implication of massive new features or breaking changes. For Zephyr, the major version number simply increments with LTS releases.
  • Zephyr Found Running on a MaxLinear MXL86282 Network Switch: Fabio discovered that his brand-new 2.5G/10G Ethernet switch runs Zephyr (version 3.2) on an embedded ARC microcontroller inside the MaxLinear switch chip. The chip family traces back to Lantiq, which was acquired by Intel, explaining the Zephyr connection. He was able to access the Zephyr shell over a serial console and disable a misbehaving feature, then soldered on a secondary board to intercept the boot sequence and automatically send the fix command on every power cycle.
  • Shout-out to Mike Szczys at Golioth for a detailed blog post on handling button press, long-press, and double-tap using Zephyr’s Input subsystem. The article covers how the subsystem uses virtual software devices for features like debouncing and gesture detection via the device model.
  • AI-Assisted Display Shield Bring-Up (Nordic Demo): Wojciech Bober from Nordic posted an impressive demo of using Claude Code to bring up a new display shield in Zephyr. The key twist: he pointed a webcam at the physical display so the LLM agent could observe its own output, iterating on display controller configuration (fixing inverted colors, etc.) until it worked.
  • QEMU RAM Framebuffer Display Driver: A new pull request adds a display driver for QEMU’s RAM framebuffer. This is especially exciting for macOS users who can’t easily run native_sim with SDL — all QEMU board targets (x86, ARM, RISC-V, Xtensa) will gain display support.
  • New Doxygen Aliases for Driver Operations: A new set of Doxygen commands has landed that provides a way to document driver class operations, including which ops are mandatory vs. optional for a given driver class. This helps developers implementing new drivers understand requirements without digging through existing driver code or header files. See the CAN driver API docs for an example of how this looks in practice.
  • Shell Readline Helper: A new API adds readline-style interactive input to the Zephyr shell, allowing shell commands to prompt the user for input (e.g., “enter a string and hit return”).
  • Native SX126x LoRa Driver: Long-time contributor Carlo Caione contributed a native LoRa driver for the Semtech SX126x series, replacing dependency on Semtech’s proprietary HAL libraries. This is a significant step toward cleaner, fully native LoRa/LoRaWAN support in Zephyr, with more related PRs expected.
  • New Board: Realtek RTL8721F EVB: Support added for the Realtek RTL8721F (AmebaG2) evaluation board featuring a Cortex-M55 plus two Realtek real-time coprocessors, 512KB SRAM, BLE 5.0, XIP external flash, hardware MJPEG decoder, USB 2.0 High-Speed, and Ethernet MAC.
  • New SoC: Nordic nRF54LM20B: Nordic contributed SoC support (no board yet) for the nRF54LM20B: an ultra-low-power wireless SoC with an integrated Axon NPU, BLE and Wi-Fi on a single chip (2.4 GHz only), QFN52 package, 2MB non-volatile memory, and 512KB SRAM.
  • Zephyr Meetup in Winterthur, Switzerland: A Zephyr meetup held the day before recording was packed with well over 100 attendees. Reminder to check the Zephyr Project website for upcoming meetups near you!
  • Embedded World & Zephyr’s 10th Anniversary: Embedded World in Nuremberg is about a month away, where Zephyr will have a major presence including a booth and a dedicated conference track on the Tuesday.