Happy New Year! Hope everyone in the Zephyr RTOS community had a safe and happy holiday. With a new road ahead, we at the Zephyr Project are excited about what’s to come in 2022. The road may not be smooth – there might be several bumps along the way – but with the support, guidance and passion of the Zephyr community, we’ll get through all the challenges.
Kate Stewart, Vice President of Dependable Embedded Systems at The Linux Foundation, sits down with Swapnil Bhartiya, Creator and Host of The Fourth Industrial Revolution, to discuss where Zephyr is headed, milestones we’ll achieve this year and more. You can watch the video or read the Q&A below.
Swapnil Bhartiya:
Now you have a virtual crystal ball in your hand, tell me what predictions you have for 2022.
Kate Stewart:
The first prediction is that we are going to see a lot more products with Zephyr in it. In 2021, we started to see companies be more visible about the fact they are using Zephyr. It’s actually in a lot of places right now already. But more people keep saying, “it’ll be visible next year.” So I’m really looking forward to seeing these products emerge so that we can see the interesting places that Zephyr’s being used. I think we’re going to see the visibility improve. A lot.
My next crystal ball prediction is I think we will see the Zephyr Project achieve a 61508 safety certification. This is something the community has been working on for quite a while. We just hired a functional safety manager and we’re moving the code base over to MR Compliance, which is something that we’ve been needing to do in this direction.
We also achieved LTS V2 at the end of 2021, which was one of the prerequisites for going after this. With the LTS V2 in place and a new functional safety manager – the stars are starting to align. There’s a team actively working on it. I think we will achieve certification.
My third prediction is that you’ll see more communication stacks and drivers being added to Zephyr. We’re seeing more of the communities wanting to use Zephyr in their own spaces. So we’ll be seeing code and functionality being added for things that right now are in certain BSPs, but not others. But I think we’ll see more things emerge, upstream, things like some of the modems for the 5G and so forth.
Swapnil Bhartiya:
Thanks for sharing those predictions. What is going to be the focus of the project in 2022?
Kate Stewart:
There’s been a lot of really good discussions happening at with the Technical Steering Committee. Our focus will be to continue to scale and have maintainers being able to effectively manage the subsystems. This foundation will basically set Zephyr up to scale larger. Obviously more technical; more drivers, more functionality, more features, more modular. Setting things up so we can work for product lines. These are all considerations that are under discussion.
Swapnil Bhartiya:
Kate, thank you so much for taking time out today and share these predictions with us. I would love to have you back on the show next year for two reasons, one to get predictions for the next year and also to check how many of your predictions turn out to be true.