By Maureen Helm, Chair of the Zephyr Technical Steering Committee
I’d like to wish a somewhat delayed, but very Happy New Year to everyone in the Zephyr Project community! Before we get too far along in 2021, let’s take a quick look back at some of our accomplishments in 2020:
- Reached a total of over 800 code contributors and 40k commits in the main repository (that’s a lot of code reviews!)
- Grew the TSC to 28 voting members and welcomed additional non-voting participants in our regular public meetings
- Collaborated in working groups focusing on APIs, toolchains, testing, process, Bluetooth, networking, security, safety, bug triage, and marketing
- Made three mainline releases and one LTS maintenance release
- Defined a set of MISRA-based coding guidelines
- Migrated to a new continuous integration infrastructure
- Defined and documented project roles for maintainers, collaborators, and contributors
- Fixed security vulnerabilities and created a user notification registry
- Introduced a toolchain abstraction with initial implementations for GCC and LLVM/Clang, and groundwork for future support of commercial toolchains
- Introduced a device tree API based on hierarchical preprocessor macros and streamlined driver instance definitions
- Aggregated board farm testing results into a common report
- Overhauled the GPIO driver subsystem
- Introduced architecture support for Arm v8-A and SPARC
- Migrated to a new TCP stack
What remarkable progress this is, considering the challenges we faced in 2020. I’m particularly proud of the folks that volunteered for new responsibilities to make all of this happen – collaborators that stepped up to maintainers, maintainers that started leading working groups or coordinated major development tasks, as well as new contributors that braved code reviews from unknown maintainers. I’m inspired by your talent and dedication, and encourage you to celebrate your success!
Looking ahead, there are some great goals and improvements to attain to. Here’s a preview of what’s coming in 2021, and we are excited for you to be a part of it:
- Automate MISRA checking and achieve compliance for in-scope components
- Create functional safety certification collateral for IEC 61508
- Enhance Bluetooth testing automation to ensure every release can pass qualification
- Extend toolchain abstraction to support additional toolchains
- Adopt an inclusive language coding guideline
- Start tracking memory footprint, power, and performance metrics
- Release LTS2
2020 was undoubtedly a difficult year, and I would like to thank each and every one of you for your efforts. I look forward to a new year and to continue working with you on the Zephyr Project. Your contributions and collaborations are so important to this thriving project. May 2021 be our best year yet.
