Written by Zephyr 3.2.0 Release Managers Fabio Baltieri, Software Engineer at Google, and Mahesh Mahadevan, Software Engineer at NXP Semiconductor
On behalf of the Zephyr Project, we are pleased to announce the release of Zephyr 3.2.0!
This release introduces two major features in the build system and module management: sysbuild and binary blobs support. Sysbuild is a new higher-level build system layer that enables combining multiple build systems together. It can be used to generate multiple images from a single build system invocation while maintaining a link between those different applications/images via a shared Kconfig layer. Binary blobs support allows vendors to integrate binary blobs into Zephyr modules, be it images or libraries.
Another major feature is the addition of Picolibc support, a footprint-optimized full C standard library implementation that can be used as an alternative to the minimal C library and Newlib.
One key component of Zephyr is the Devicetree support, this release saw some significant rework in the devicetree infrastructure to deprecate the label property, as well converting all the remaining board from pinmux to pinctrl. Label properties and pinmux have been declared as deprecated as consequence. Also a new feature has been added to generate automatic Kconfig entries for compatible devices, which allows for simpler project config files by automatically selecting the corresponding Kconfig enable options.
Finally on the subsystem front, we added support for 1-Wire controllers and a few initial devices, and we also added an initial API for I3C support.
If you are interested in being a part of our community, you can find the Getting Started Guide here. We welcome contributors to the Zephyr Project; to participate please see the Contributor Guide. Join the conversation or ask questions on our Discord channel and Mailing List.