- We’re back from the summer break, with three weeks of PRs to catch up on
- Listener follow-up: the Microchip XC32 compiler is now free
- Nominations still open for the Zephyr Community Awards
- The 2026 RTOS Performance Report: more RTOSes, more targets, Zephyr most improved
- PINE64 pauses Linux board production until RAM prices drop
- Linux staging now rejects LLM-generated patches
- Rust’s AI policy: nobody but the author has to read LLM output
- GCC analyzer, ASan, UBSan and LSan in the daily scheduled scans
- Zephyr Desktop, a Windows-95-style GUI with llext apps and Minesweeper
- A Linux temperature native_sim driver for host hwmon sensors
- A generic mux control API, with a driver for the ADGM3121 MEMS switch
- Minimum CMake version bumped to 3.28
- A generic tickless system-timer core shared across SoC timer drivers
- zperf loopback throughput checks for networking benchmarks
- DHCPv6-PD prefix delegation for Zephyr gateways
- K_MSGQ_DEFINE_STATIC and K_MSGQ_DEFINE_TYPE for file-local message queues
- LwM2M is spelled with a lowercase w
- An i2c-tiny-usb sample that turns a USB+I2C board into a Linux I2C dongle
- New boards: nRF7120 DK, UDOO KEY, MaTouch MTRO128G, Olimex ESP32-P4-PC, DECT NR+ USB Dongle, STM32H7 HDMI Board, X-NUCLEO-PGEEZ1
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Episode Summary
- Community Awards: Only a few weeks left to nominate someone for the Zephyr Community Awards, handed out at ZDS in Prague. Most categories are about the work that isn’t code, and self-nominations are fine.
- 2026 RTOS Performance Report: The new Beningo RTOS report covers more RTOSes and more Cortex-M targets, and shows Zephyr as by far the most improved year over year, largely because the community took last year’s results seriously. A context-switch benchmark still only measures one small part of an RTOS.
- PINE64 Pauses Linux Boards: PINE64 is halting production of its Linux-capable Cortex-A boards until the AI-driven RAM price surge subsides. The microcontroller line continues.
- Two AI Policies: Linux’s staging area now rejects LLM-generated patches on the grounds that staging exists for people to learn, while Rust’s new AI policy says nobody but the author is required to read LLM output, and anything reaching a public review must be clearly marked.
- More Scheduled Scanners: The daily CI scans now include the GCC analyzer plus ASan, UBSan and LSan over the kernel, libraries, arch code, networking, Bluetooth and drivers, with findings surfacing in GitHub’s code scanning tab next to CodeQL and friends.
- Zephyr Desktop: Jonathan Beri’s Zephyr Desktop is a very Windows-95-looking windowing environment on top of Zephyr and LVGL, with a filesystem, apps loaded at runtime through llext, and yes, Minesweeper.
- Linux Temperature native_sim Driver: A new native_sim temperature driver reads a host hwmon sensor and reports it as a regular Zephyr sensor, so you can build things like “turn the LED on when the host gets hot” entirely on your workstation.
- Mux Control API: A generic mux control API from NXP lets you describe hardware signal multiplexers as devicetree nodes and reference them from other nodes. It ships with a driver for the ADGM3121, an Analog Devices MEMS switch that puts an actual physical switch inside an IC and handles DC to 24 GHz.
- CMake 3.28 Minimum: Zephyr’s minimum CMake version moves from 3.20 to 3.28, still conservative enough for common distros, and it unblocks nicer SPDX/SBOM tooling in an in-flight PR.
- Generic Tickless Timer Core: Nicolas Pitre’s generic tickless system-timer core pulls the duplicated cycle-to-tick maths out of every SoC timer driver into shared code. Scary territory, and exactly the kind of work that keeps the project maintainable.
- zperf Loopback Throughput Check: A deterministic zperf loopback test makes it easy to quantify what a networking patch actually does to throughput under QEMU. The networking folks have already been posting numbers on their PRs, and the recent gains are firmly in the double digits.
- DHCPv6-PD: DHCPv6 prefix delegation lets a Zephyr device request not just an address for itself but a whole subnet to delegate to the devices behind it, which is useful for IoT gateways, assuming your ISP actually routes the packets back.
- Static Message Queues: K_MSGQ_DEFINE_STATIC and K_MSGQ_DEFINE_TYPE fix the case where static only applied to the first of the several objects the old macro defined, keeping file-scope message queues out of the global namespace.
- LwM2M Spelling: A tree-wide cleanup settles it: lightweight M2M is LwM2M, with a lowercase w.
- i2c-tiny-usb Sample: A new i2c-tiny-usb sample turns any board with USB and I2C into a Linux I2C dongle, which is excellent for poking at kernel I2C drivers. A small patch to the Linux driver to claim a proper VID/PID is on its way.
- New Boards: A quick tour of the nRF7120 DK, the paddle-shaped UDOO KEY, the MaTouch MTRO128G rotary display, the Olimex ESP32-P4-PC, the Norik DECT NR+ USB Dongle pairing an RP2040 with an nRF9151, Antmicro’s STM32H7 HDMI Board with a remarkably small Murata PoE+ module, and the X-NUCLEO-PGEEZ1 M95P32 EEPROM shield.