Written by Amy Occhialino – Intel Corporation, 2025 Governing Board Chair for the Zephyr Project
Welcome to 2025! As we kick off the new year, the Governing Board would like to summarize our broad objectives for the year and extend a warm welcome to our newest community members: Microchip, Honda, Hubble Network, IAR, Doulos, and Innovex.
The Zephyr Project’s Governing Board, composed of Analog Devices, Antmicro, Cariad, Google, Intel, Meta, Nordic Semiconductor, NXP, Oticon, Qualcomm, and Zeiss, convenes annually in Q4 to set strategic objectives for the upcoming year. For 2025, these objectives fall into six key areas:
Security
Zephyr Project continues to prioritize security with the following goals for 2025:
- Enhancing hardware cryptographic acceleration.
- Strengthening security partnerships.
- Evaluating PSA Firmware Update API adoption.
- Addressing emerging regulatory requirements.
- Supporting security training initiatives to empower developers.
Safety
Building on 2024’s milestone of obtaining written concept approval for IEC 61508 certification of the Zephyr RTOS kernel, 2025 will focus on:
- Advancing processes for Safety Element out of Context (SEooC) to align with IEC 61508 standards.
- Creating traceability between safety requirements and increasing test coverage.
Developer Experience
- Our dedicated developer advocate, Benjamin Cabe, leads initiatives to enhance developer experience, ensuring ease of use, robust documentation, and accessible tools for the community.
- The Zephyr project faces the challenge of providing a smooth and engaging developer experience to a diverse audience that includes hobbyists, commercial developers, and silicon vendors. The Developer Experience pillar aims to improve documentation, streamline workflows, expand educational resources, and foster an inclusive community.
- In 2025, the focus will be on delivering top-notch documentation and improving the developer onboarding process, recognizing that getting started with Zephyr can be daunting. With an expected 3,000 contributors since the project’s inception, community input and contributions will be essential in achieving these goals.
Connectivity
For 2025, connectivity efforts will focus on Bluetooth LE and networking, specifically:
- Expanding Auracast feature sets and regression test coverage.
- Establishing a framework within Zephyr for community contributions related to baseline and performance monitoring.
Sustainability
- Sustainability is a core goal of the Zephyr Project. To ensure its continued success, the project fosters a thriving ecosystem and maintains best practices. A key part of this is expanding Zephyr adoption, especially among members, by positioning it as a solid base for products with long lifecycles. By understanding the needs and values of both the community and member organizations, the project can focus on features and stability that encourage long-term use.
- Zephyr upholds strict policies for maintaining interfaces and features to prevent needless deprecations or breaking changes that could hinder adoption. Building an ecosystem around Zephyr for long-term user support and service development is also vital, especially for balancing the needs of early adopters and organizations that need stability and slower transitions. Ensuring compliance with copyright and licensing requirements is also crucial for protecting intellectual property and preventing license violations that could harm the project.
- Sustainability also means ensuring the continuation of services Zephyr depends on and minimizing disruptions when contributors leave or are unable to fulfill their roles. To safeguard the project’s future, Zephyr actively encourages members and non-members to take on leadership roles, fostering a consistent flow of contributors who drive innovation while maintaining stability.
Dependability
To enhance quality and security, Zephyr Project will:
- Maintain accessible dashboards.
- Improve regression testing methodologies.
- Align with key security and safety modules, advancing towards IEC 61508 compliance.
- Remove roadblocks for safety certifications.
- Ensure compliance with global governmental security regulations.
Each of these strategic pillars is championed by a Governing Board member, responsible for defining objectives, monitoring progress, and addressing challenges within the community. These objectives will be reviewed with the Technical Steering Committee (TSC) in a joint session on April 3, 2025.
Join Us at Embedded World 2025
Zephyr Project will have a strong presence at Embedded World, which takes place on March 11-13, 2025 in Nuremberg, Germany. Zephyr has several presentations scheduled and will have a stand (Hall 4, Booth Number 4-170) on the exhibition floor. Stay tuned here for more details about the demonstrations and exciting announcements showcasing Zephyr’s latest advancements!
To keep up to date about the project, subscribe to the Zephyr quarterly newsletter or connect with us on @ZephyrIoT, Zephyr Project LinkedIn or the Zephyr Discord Channel to talk with community and TSC members.