The Open Source Summit North America took place from June 23-25, 2024, in Denver, Colorado, and brought together a dynamic and diverse open source community. With 1,535 in-person attendees representing 732 organizations, the summit reflected the growing momentum and collaboration across the ecosystem.
The audience featured professionals from across the open source spectrum, including embedded and systems developers, security experts, DevOps engineers, and product managers. North America made up 81% of the attendees, with the USA, Canada, and the UK among the most represented countries.
The event featured:
- 263 conference talks
- 1,243 total talk submissions
- 51 sponsors showcasing technologies and tools from across the open source landscape
The Zephyr Project had a strong presence at the summit with multiple talks highlighting real-world applications, technical innovations, and community collaboration efforts.
Across the coming weeks, we will be publishing highlights from each Zephyr-related session, looking into topics such as security, long-term support, tooling, and the integration of Rust into Zephyr-based development.
Stay tuned as we recap the key takeaways and discussions that are shaping the future of Zephyr RTOS.
Why Rust and Zephyr Are a Good Fit – David Brown, Linaro
As embedded developers explore Rust for safety, performance, and modern tooling, choosing the right RTOS becomes critical. This talk explores why Zephyr RTOS is a natural fit for Rust-based embedded applications and details the ongoing work to integrate Rust into the Zephyr ecosystem.
David Brown shares how Rust’s memory safety and async model complement Zephyr’s strengths: a unified build system, broad hardware support, and robust primitives like threads, work queues, and semaphores. He discusses the creation of clean Rust bindings to Zephyr APIs, the minimal glue code required, and the ability to write full Zephyr applications in Rust while leveraging cargo for dependency management.
Key highlights include:
- Advantages of combining Rust’s safe concurrency with Zephyr’s real-time capabilities
- Architecture of the Rust-on-Zephyr integration and its build flow
- Async task execution using Zephyr threads and Embassy executors
- Lessons learned from mapping C APIs to Rust’s safety model and handling binding maintenance
- Current capabilities (GPIO, synchronization primitives, async support) and next steps (device drivers, logging, user space, and expanded subsystem access)
This session provides insights for developers interested in safe, modern embedded development using Rust and Zephyr, along with guidance on how to contribute and experiment with this growing ecosystem. Slides here.
Real-Time I/O (RTIO) for Developing Real-Time Zephyr Applications – Luis Ubieda, Croxel
RTIO (Real-Time I/O) is a new subsystem in Zephyr designed to enable efficient, low-latency, time-critical I/O operations for embedded systems. In this talk, Luis Ubieda introduces RTIO’s architecture and capabilities, explaining how it helps developers meet real-time performance requirements in complex sensor and control applications.
The presentation covers:
- An overview of RTIO’s core concepts: submission/completion queues, executors, and IO devices
- Differences between synchronous and asynchronous paradigms in real-time applications
- Practical examples using in-tree RTIO support for sensor and bus drivers
- Step-by-step integration guidance for using RTIO in Zephyr applications
- A live comparison of performance (latency, jitter, CPU load) between RTIO-based and traditional thread-based implementations
Luis also discusses benchmarks using multiple high-frequency sensors and demonstrates how RTIO reduces jitter and CPU load while improving timing consistency. Future plans for RTIO include expanded support for ADCs, image sensors, audio, and potentially zero-CPU-intervention peripheral chaining. Slides here.
Missed Open Source Summit North America 2025?
If you are looking forward to attending Zephyr talks or connecting with the community, Open Source Summit Europe + Zephyr Developer Summit (25–27 August 2025) in Amsterdam is your next big opportunity!
Stop by Booth B23 to see Zephyr in action, meet the team, and explore real-world demos. Whether you’re a long-time contributor or new to Zephyr, the Summit is the perfect place to learn, share, and get involved. Read more here.
Join us in Amsterdam, see you there!
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.