What's New in Zephyr 3.4?

Aug. 23, 2023

The latest release of the open-source RTOS include advances such as the ability to work with NVMe storage devices and SMBus-based peripherals, among a host of other enhancements.

William G. Wong

Related To: Electronic Design

This video is part of the TechXchange: RTOS: Zephyr Project.

The Zephyr Project is a compact, real-time operating system (RTOS). Because it's an open-source project, the source code is available for all to use. It works with multiple hardware platforms including Arm and RISC-V. Zephyr has a native IPv4/IPv6 network stack and supports the latest wireless hardware with protocols like Bluetooth 5. It can handle chip-level security for features like secure boot and will fit in as little as 8 kB of code space.

Some of the major enhancements include the ability to work with NVMe storage devices, SMBus-based peripherals, and more uniform interfaces to real-time clock hardware (see figure). Retained memory is RAM-based storage that's maintained across reboots versus flash memory that has higher overhead.

1. These are some of the new and improved interfaces supported by Zephyr 3.4.

Zephyr uses a testing framework called Twister. It's designed to support unit tests and now works with third-party test frameworks like pyTest, GoogleTest, and the Robot Framework. Zephyr's compact size makes it well-suited for many robotic projects.

On June 16, 2023, Zephyr 3.4 was released. The video (above) delves into the new features including:

00:08 - Introduction
01:21 - Some of the new supported boards
06:15 - New Peripherals
07:47 - Auxiliary displays
13:09 - NVMe
14:41 - Retained memory
17:48 - SMBus
18:53 - Real-time clocks
24:49 - Input subsystem
32:07 - Twister framework improvements
37:31 - Snippets
40:08 - Notable changes to Zephyr SDK
42:24 - Bluetooth updates
45:26 - Wrap-up

Links

About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

I still get a hand on software and electronic hardware. Some of this can be found on our Kit Close-Up video series. You can also see me on many of our TechXchange Talk videos. I am interested in a range of projects from robotics to artificial intelligence.