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.
Optimizing Zephyr for Peak Performance – Jacob Beningo, Beningo Embedded Group
Zephyr is rapidly becoming the RTOS of choice for real-time, resource-constrained embedded systems. Its rich feature set and ecosystem offer immense flexibility, but achieving peak performance requires a deep understanding of its architecture and tuning opportunities.
In this session, Jacob Beningo explores practical techniques for optimizing Zephyr-based applications to meet demanding performance, power, and memory requirements. Drawing on 20+ years of embedded development experience, Jacob walks attendees through real-world strategies to fine-tune scheduling, memory usage, and interrupt handling. He also presents profiling methodologies and kernel-level optimizations, including insights from recent benchmarking efforts that helped drive improvements in Zephyr 4.1.
Key takeaways include:
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Understanding Zephyr’s scheduling models and applying rate-monotonic analysis
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Minimizing latency and jitter through proper thread prioritization and ISR design
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Avoiding common pitfalls like task starvation, deadlocks, and priority inversion
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Using trace tools (e.g., SystemView, Tracealyzer) for real-time performance diagnostics
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Fine-tuning kernel features, such as MPU, logging, time slicing, and build configurations
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Strategies for memory and power optimization in resource-constrained systems
Whether you’re developing for IoT, industrial automation, or real-time control, this session will equip you with practical strategies to maximize Zephyr’s performance and reliability. Slides here.
West: Explained in Simple Words – Roy Jamil, AC6
If you are new to Zephyr or coming from a bare-metal or traditional RTOS background, West the Zephyr meta-tool can seem intimidating at first. But once you understand its purpose, you will see that it’s not a barrier to development, it’s a powerful enabler.
In this session, Roy Jamil explains West using plain language and practical examples. Attendees will learn what West is, why it was created, and how it simplifies working with Zephyr’s complex, multi-repository architecture. You will see how West unifies project management, dependency handling, building, flashing, testing, and even adding custom commands, all through a consistent command-line interface.
Key highlights:
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Why West exists (and why submodules and repo weren’t enough)
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How West manages Zephyr’s dependencies and workspaces
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The three common West workspace topologies (T1, T2, T3)
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Building, flashing, debugging, and customizing with West commands
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How to extend West with your own scripts and tooling
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Practical demos and tips from real-world teaching and development
Whether you are starting with Zephyr or looking to better structure your project, this session will help you fully understand and implement West as the central tool in your Zephyr workflow. 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.