The first-ever Zephyr Developer Summit, which took place virtually on June 8-10, had 3 tracks, 5 mini-conferences, 28 sessions and 51 speakers who presented engaging technical content, best practices, use cases and more. Check out the session videos here!
Zephyr is a fast-growing, both in terms of contributions and adoption, open source RTOS that is designed to be small, optimized, scalable and secure for resource constrained devices and applications. In this session, Diego Sueiro will go through the detailed process of adding support for new architectures and hardware platforms in Zephyr, showing a step-by-step guide with a real example pointing out the caveats and some debugging tricks.
Main topics of this presentation include hardware support implementation in Zephyr, adding a new HAL, adding a new SoC, adding a new Board, adding new drivers, and contributing to mainline
EdgeX Foundry is a vendor-neutral open source project building a common open framework for IoT edge computing. EdgeX is an important enabler for interested parties to freely collaborate on open and interoperable IoT solutions built using existing connectivity standards combined with their own innovations. The Zephyr Project is a scalable real-time operating system (RTOS) supporting multiple hardware architectures, optimized for resource-constrained devices, and built with security in mind. Zephyr OS was created in response to clear needs in the ecosystem for a small, scalable RTOS which supports multiple hardware architectures. This presentation will showcase how the two projects are working together to advance the open IoT and embedded ecosystem. The speakers will demonstrate how the two technologies enable rapid IoT development via plug and play components that feed into a common, edge platform architecture.
Bluetooth mesh was released in 2017 and allows secure networks of thousands of Bluetooth devices to be created. It uses Bluetooth Low Energy (LE) for radio communications and inherits its optimized, low power and other characteristics. The Zephyr open source OS supports Bluetooth mesh on devices as affordable as the BBC micro:bit. This session will explain the fundamental technical concepts of Bluetooth mesh, including models, messages, publish/subscribe, node composition and security keys and will explore what’s involved in implementing firmware that uses Bluetooth mesh on the Zephyr RTOS platform. There will be code. There may even by live demos.
TLS (formerly SSL) is fairly well known, and most people are familiar with it through the ‘s’ at the end of the ‘https’ in web URLs. Securing communication is also important in the IoT space, and presents challenges that are not present in the browser environment. In this presentation, David Brown will give a brief overview of TLS, cover some of the challenges faced using it in the IoT space, and show the current work being done to better support TLS in the Zephyr project.
Bluetooth is 20 years young in short range wireless technology, operating in the ISM band with over 30000 member companies worldwide. Support for Bluetooth in Zephyr OS is present since its initial releases, and a fully open source controller sub-system contributed and released in Zephyr OS v1.6 release in December 2016. The presentation gives an introduction to Bluetooth Low Energy Controller implementation in the Zephyr OS, covering the aspects of scheduling a radio event, different types of radio events comprising the PHYs, states and roles in Bluetooth Low Energy Controller, and data flow within the controller sub-system.The presentation covers the topics of designing a multi-vendor capable sub-system, a new controller architecture, its implementation, real-time scheduling, maximizing radio utilization, higher overall throughput and an ultra low power race-to-idle execution of code.
We have seen no slow-down of critical vulnerabilities in computing systems, luckily successful open source projects can protect us, right? Oh but wait, what if you rely on long-term-support (LTS) software that hasn’t been updated yet, or your engineers created a customized franken-kernel to support a specific product? How can you wait for LTS to be updated or hire key experts to cleanly backport critical fixes? And how do we get this to our hundreds, thousands or millions of deployed products quickly? Instead of continuing the trend of forking and backporting, it’s time to work with the community on the latest software where the developers are addressing bugs, security issues and improving performance of their projects. Ricardo and Mike will show you how you can build better embedded products with the help of some amazing new open source technologies and some good design practices.
WiFi support for the Zephyr OS exists in the form of an offload tap from the native Zephyr IP stack, and a WiFi driver interface supporting connection management functions. TLS support for secure socket communication is being added to the Zephyr BSD socket interface, backed by a port of mbedTLS. This talk will review the Zephyr WiFi offload architecture, and discuss an implementation of a WiFi offload driver for the TI CC3220SF SoC, where all the secure communication, secret storage, and encryption is handled by the offload chip.
Open-source software development and how open-source projects are run is often seen as incompatible with functional safety requirements and established processes and standards. Open-source has however been used and is used on a regular basis in applications with safety requirements however in most cases the open-source software is forked and developed behind closed doors to comply with safety standards and processes and using existing infrastructure and tools not common or not available in public and in open-source.
This talk will show how the Zephyr project is moving to a new development process and methodology that uses existing and public tools to address many of the requirements and foundations that would help with using Zephyr in applications depending on functional safety.
The goal of the presentation is to present the current state of the Zephyr Project and implementation of trusted execution environment support. Andy will discuss the various changes required to support ARMv8M and ARMv7M trusted execution environments, with a focus on the ARM trusted firmware on ARM Cortex M. The presentation will include implementation updates on the configuration of security and partitioning of hardware resources, secure boot and multiple image support, and secure function definitions and APIs. About Andy Gross I’ve been doing embedded work for the past 20 years in various capacities (telecommunications, consumer products, and semiconductor companies). I currently work for Linaro as a member of the IoT group (LITE).
The choice for an RTOS can be an opaque one. There are a number of RTOS’ available with different levels of feature sets, abstractions and out-of-the-box board support, which make the choice from a blank slate a very diverse one. Franco will guide you through the decision process for an RTOS and goes on to discuss implementation details. The choice is driven by factors from a startup environment, including a small development team, industry standards and testing. Explicit technical touch points are board support, the low power subsystem, the memory and file system subsystems, and the networking subsystem. Franco presents this from his three-year experience with Zephyr in the role as lead developer for industrial IoT systems in two startups. He has gained his knowledge over time from porting a bare-metal application to the RTOS, and upgrading the project to a new release version.
