Written by Kumar Gala, Member of the Zephyr Technical Steering Committee, and Principle Tech Lead at Linaro
On behalf of the Zephyr Project, I am pleased to announce the release of Zephyr 2.6.0. This release focused on setting the stage for the LTS release this fall. The release continued the effort in overhauling the power management, logging, and tracing subsystems. New in this version is support for the 64-bit ARC v3 architecture, ARM Cortex-M55, and integrations of Nanopb (Protocol buffers for embedded systems) and TensorFlow (software library for machine learning).
In this release, the overhaul of the power management subsystem focused on re-implementing device runtime power management support, addressing concurrency issues, and allowing power management to be used in pre-kernel stages. The interaction between system and device power management got several improvements as well, among them is not resuming devices that were already suspended when the system went to sleep. We are excited about the work that has been completed and look forward to increasing the number of SoCs and device drivers that support power management.
The new logging subsystem addresses a number of limitations with the previous subsystem, including the ability to log any variable types (including floating point variables). The tracing subsystem expanded and overhauled tracing hooks with more coverage and support for tracing all kernel objects and basic power management operations. Support was added for Percepio Tracealyzer and was enhanced for SEGGER Systemview.
For a detailed overview of changes since the last release, please read the release note.
Thank you to everyone that contributed features, documentation, testing, infrastructure, and bug fixes to this release. And a warm welcome to the new contributors and community members that have recently joined the Zephyr Project!
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 Mailing List.