Open Source Summit North America 2025

Machine Learning and AI are experiencing explosive growth. The concentration of AI power in the datacenters, as well as the current trends in training and inferencing infrastructure built around power-hungry GPUs and control nodes running interpretive languages on full-fledged monolithic operating systems brings about an evermore greater need for energy. In this talk we will sketch a different future: one where the needs of scaling are addressed in a way of embedding lightweight control software running on energy-efficient hardware into a sea of heterogeneous compute accelerators arranged in an energy-conserving fashion. One where the edge devices, be it small IoT nodes or an intelligence subsystem inside a mobile device can all be included in one global, distributed, cognitive and sustainable network supporting the users.
We intend to cover our recent developments in the way of porting IREE to run on Zephyr's POSIX layer, as well as experiments to see how Zephyr as a lightweight library kernel can support typical inference tasks that were used as workloads to tune an accelerator's micro-architecture (using gem5 simulator) as well as to emulate the design on the FPGA as a scale-up.

The Yocto Project can build for a variety of targets: Linux, Zephyr, baremetal, etc. Using multiconfig one can target a combination of these environments in one single configured build. Zephyr is a real-time operating system (RTOS) that is open source and hosted by the Linux Foundation. It’s an collaborative effort uniting developers and users in building a best-in-class small, scalable, real-time operating system (RTOS) optimized for resource-constrained devices, across multiple architectures.

This talk will discuss how to configure a multiconfig builds for MicroBlaze-V(RISC-V) FPGA using Yocto Project meta-zephyr, with integrated binary components for Zephyr using a System DeviceTree(SDT) processed through the lopper tool to generate Zephyr Kconfig, DTS and Multiconfig Configuration files for MB-V. The resulting configuration files are then used to build and package Zephyr including but not limited to the Zephyr Kernel and peripheral drivers using the Yocto Project.

Hardware availability is among the many challenges embedded software engineers face when working on new designs. In the case of MCU-based applications, embedded software engineers need to wait for the hardware to arrive to validate portions of their application that exercise the underlying hardware. Additionally, if the application is part of a network and the network can contain hundreds or thousands of nodes, engineers may find it difficult to evaluate their design when the network is under load. Fortunately, The Zephyr Project RTOS has the infrastructure to allow embedded software engineers to evaluate as much of their design with access to the necessary hardware. In this talk, I will walk through these tools and how they can be used to evaluate the embedded software design before hardware is ready. The tools covered in this talk will be QEMU, BabbleSim, and Renode. They will be showcased with code, invocations, and results to demonstrate their value.

Engineers coming from traditional RTOS or bare metal backgrounds may initially see Zephyr's meta-tool, West, as an unfamiliar hurdle. While it might seem a bit complex at first, West is actually a simple and effective way to handle multiple repositories, as well as to build, debug, analyze, and more.

In this talk, we’ll break down what West does and how it fits into the Zephyr ecosystem. We'll use plain language and practical examples, showing that West isn’t a barrier at all. Instead, it’s a powerful tool that makes managing your projects easier and more organized. From my experience teaching Zephyr and West, I’ve seen how quickly developers come to appreciate its capabilities once they understand how it fits into their workflow.

We'll also explore why West exists and dive into its range of commands. Plus, we'll highlight the opportunities it offers, including enabling capabilities that were not possible without it.

Finally, we’ll demonstrate how to create custom commands with West and provide examples of how you might tailor these commands to meet the specific needs of your applications.