Blog

150,000 Commits Later — Zephyr Podcast #048

By August 28, 2026No Comments
The Zephyr Podcast, episode 048

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

  • 150,000 Commits: Zephyr’s main branch passed 150,000 commits this week, and August alone saw 1,455 pull requests merged against roughly 700 in the same month last year. Around a third of last month’s commits carry an assisted-by trailer noting AI help, which is voluntary, so the real figure is probably higher.
  • The Merge Batch Experiment: With GitHub taking minutes rather than seconds to recompute mergeability, the release team is trialling a flow that stages a whole batch on a branch and runs CI over it before the individual PRs go into main. The upside for contributors is a smoother merge process and a main branch that breaks less often.
  • Build Your Own Debug Adapter: A meetup talk on creating a debug adapter with custom hardware and almost no code — a spare microcontroller, Zephyr’s DAP support and a USB CDC UART bridge give you an embeddable debug probe with barely any code of your own.
  • VirtIO Drivers: A VirtIO block disk driver has landed, with a VirtIO GPIO driver and SPI and I2C queued up behind it. Adding drivers on top of the existing virtqueue backend turns out to be fairly mechanical, and the payoff is a much richer QEMU environment to develop against.
  • I2C Target Register Sets: The register-map code from the EEPROM target sample is now a reusable library, so an I2C target that emulates a device with byte-addressed registers no longer has to touch the low-level target API. It ships with a fake TMP103, handy for exercising a Linux driver against a Zephyr board.
  • Easier SBOMs: Thanks to the recent CMake version bump, west spdx --init is no longer necessary — any vanilla build folder can now produce its SPDX software bill of materials, with no pre-initialisation step.
  • pulse_io: A new vendor-neutral timed-edge IO subsystem from the Espressif folks, for sending and receiving data encoded as pulse lengths. It backs the ESP32 RMT peripheral today, with infrared remotes and addressable LEDs as the obvious use cases.
  • Twister Console Monitor: A new console monitor gives twister a full-screen UI showing every build, its state and its logs, instead of a wall of scrolling output.
  • New SoC Series: TI Tiva C brings another general-purpose Cortex-M4 family to a growing TI lineup, while the STM32WL3x series pairs a Cortex-M0 with a sub-GHz radio and, unusually, exposes 16-bit IQ data — the raw material for software-defined radio experiments, if you can fit them on an M0.
  • Two Pin Controllers, One SoC: RP1 pinctrl support for the Raspberry Pi 5 is interesting well beyond the board itself: Zephyr’s pin control subsystem assumed one driver per SoC, and the Pi 5 has two independent ones. The fix is a small SoC-level shim that redirects calls to whichever controller owns the pin.
  • DALI 2 Click: The MikroElektronika DALI 2 Click is now a supported shield, making it easier to try the DALI lighting subsystem on hardware you already own.
  • ESP32-C61: Support for the ESP32-C61, a cheaper single-core RISC-V part with the usual Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Espressif also maintain QEMU forks covering the ESP32, C3 and C6, and are wiring Zephyr up so you can target the QEMU variants of the existing dev kits — a model more vendors could copy.
  • Community Awards: A reminder to nominate someone for the Zephyr Community Awards ahead of ZDS in Prague — outreach, documentation and technical work all have categories.