Zephyr (operating system)

Zephyr originated from Virtuoso RTOS for digital signal processors (DSPs).[9][10] In 2001, Wind River Systems acquired Belgian software company Eonic Systems, the developer of Virtuoso. In November 2015, Wind River Systems renamed the operating system to Rocket, made it open-source and royalty-free.[10] Compared to Wind River's other RTOS, VxWorks, Rocket had a much smaller memory needs, especially suitable for sensors and single-function embedded devices. Rocket could fit into as little as 4 KB of memory, while VxWorks needed 200 KB or more.[10]

In February 2016, Rocket became a hosted collaborative project of the Linux Foundation under the name Zephyr.[9][11][1] Wind River Systems contributed the Rocket kernel to Zephyr, but still provided Rocket to its clients, charging them for the cloud services.[12][10] As a result, Rocket became "essentially the commercial version of Zephyr".[12]

Since then, early members and supporters of Zephyr include Intel, NXP Semiconductors, Synopsys, Linaro,[13] Texas Instruments, DeviceTone, Nordic Semiconductor, Oticon, and Bose.[14]

As of January 2022, Zephyr had the largest number of contributors and commits compared to other RTOSes (including Mbed, RT-Thread, NuttX, and RIOT).[15]

Zephyr intends to provide all components needed to develop resource-constrained and embedded or microcontroller-based applications. This includes, but is not limited to:[8]

• A small kernel
• A flexible configuration and build system for compile-time definition of required resources and modules
• A set of protocol stacks (IPv4 and IPv6, Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP), LwM2M, MQTT, 802.15.4, Thread, Bluetooth Low Energy, CAN)
• A virtual file system interface with several flash file systems for non-volatile storage (FatFs, LittleFS, NVS)
• Management and device firmware update mechanisms

• Embedded operating system