Open Source Summit North America 2025

When seeking to use Rust for embedded development, there are several options, including bare-metal, a few rust-specific rtos implementations, and several existing RTOSes. This talk discusses why Zephyr is a good fit for an embedded Rust, and especially how we are able to leverage some of Zephyr's strengths, including a rich and diverse set of supported targets, and some of Zephyr's features, such as the work queue mechanism, and how it fits well with Rust's async system.

This talk would highlight the importance of open source health devices and how we used Zephyr across several hardware platforms to develop these devices. We will draw on experiences from our projects including HealthyPi 5, HealthyPi 6 and the wearable HealthyPi Move, all open source hardware and software. More specifically how Zephyr enabled the use of practically a single codebase across three different microcontroller platforms in different form factors.

l will also talk about the challenges faced during the process of making the system wearable and low power and the solutions that worked for us.

The FUOTA (Firmware Update Over-The-Air) specification(s) from LoRa Alliance make up the framework that underpins the critical task of firmware updates of end points (typically battery operated sensors and actuators) that communicate using the LoRaWAN protocol.

The fundamental limitation of the FUOTA specification, as it exists today, is that it does not expect Firmware Artifacts to exceed a few hundred KB in size. With the increasing adoption of the Zephyr RTOS, along with more sophisticated capabilities being added to the end device, artifact sizes have quickly grown to 500 kB (and beyond). This limitation quickly starts to have a real impact, especially as the cost of doing so called 'drive by' updates (using BLE or other higher throughput transports) can get prohibitive.

We present a novel solution to this problem, leveraging the existing and well supported Device Firmware Update (DFU) specification.

In our solution, the LORAWAN protocol becomes another type of SMP transport (along with the already supported Shell, Bluetooth and UDP). We have extended the open source smpclient library from intercreate, as well as the open source LBM stack from Semtech to achieve this.

RTIO is a relatively new subsystem in Zephyr, and it enables applications to perform time-critical I/O operations.

This presentation covers:
- Basics of RTIO.
- Async vs Sync paradigms.
- In-tree examples of RTIO: Sensors and Bus drivers.
- Integration guide: how to use RTIO in your Zephyr application.
- Demo: Comparison of Sensor driver with RTIO vs without RTIO.

This presentation is for you:
- You want to learn about RTIO.
- You struggle at achieving real-time performance in Zephyr applications.
- You want to optimize performance of your existing application.

The Zephyr Project is a leading open-source RTOS for resource-constrained, real-time applications. Its modularity, vendor neutrality, and rich ecosystem make it a powerful choice for embedded developers. However, achieving peak performance requires a deep understanding of Zephyr’s internals and optimization strategies.

This session explores techniques to optimize Zephyr applications for efficiency, low latency, and real-time predictability. Attendees will learn how scheduling, memory management, and interrupt handling impact performance and how to fine-tune these elements for specific workloads. We’ll cover configuring Zephyr for high-performance execution, reducing runtime overhead, and debugging bottlenecks.

Key topics include:
• Zephyr’s scheduling model and task prioritization
• Optimizing interrupts and reducing latency
• Fine-tuning memory management and resource allocation
• Profiling and debugging performance issues
• Advanced optimizations for power efficiency and I/O

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.

In this presentation, Eoin will introduce a practical approach to Edge MLOps for microcontroller-based systems using the Zephyr RTOS. Edge MLOps unifies DevOps, ML model development, and edge deployment practices to streamline the entire AI lifecycle at the device level—from data collection and processing to model training, deployment, and continuous monitoring.

Attendees will learn how to implement version control for data and models, design automated CI/CD pipelines that handle real-world sensor data, and manage over-the-air (OTA) firmware updates on constrained Zephyr-based devices. We will explore best practices to ensure data integrity, model governance, and security throughout the pipeline, including techniques to mitigate model drift and bias.

Through a demonstration of an end-to-end IoT architecture, participants will see how edge devices can continuously collect new data, trigger remote training in the cloud, and deploy updated ML models back to the field. The talk will also highlight how Git action-based workflows enable seamless version transitions for on-device inference, showing how TFLite Micro or other open-source models —can be integrated platform-agnostic.

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.

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.