Zephyr

[Omicron]

Does anyone have any experience using this RTOS:

https://www.zephyrproject.org

I was considering NuttX for a new project but this seems like it might be an alternative. I'm wondering if anyone has used it in a project? Any good or bad experiences with it?

[krho]

It depends on what CPU you will use.
Most of the CPUs they say are supported only UART and some timers are supported and that's it.

Nuttx supports more hardware out of the box. But I've given up on it. I don't have any more time to debug buggy USB stack on STM32L4

[coppice]

The RTOS market is so horribly fragmented. I haven't seen one where all the pieces of the puzzle are polished. There really needs to be a shakeout, until the number left standing allows adequate resources to be pumped into each of the ones left standing.

[Omicron]

I'm mostly interested in arm. It seems the latest versions do have decent support for higher level features on STM32. E.g networking. My concern with NuttX is that it seems to be a one person project.

[jnz]

I looked into it for a lightweight python interpreter to run scripts from C - they have all the parts to do that - but it doesn’t.

It’s bloated compared to C. It’s without question inefficient. And I’m sure it has a place for enthusiasts, but for a real commercial product no way.

[obiwanjacobi]

It's hard to find good usage patterns that cover all (most) of the options - in general.
Everybody is looking for it that is why there are so many of everything. You should see the libraries in the JavaScript community - it's a complete mess.

[mac.6]

Zephyr is not an RTOS, it's a framework with an RTOS. That's why it's so "bloated"
I have seen that they moved to CMake, which is way better than reusing kbuild.

[Omicron]

I'm not sure I understand what Zephyr has to do with running Python scripts.

If all I needed was an RTOS kernel then I'd have to look no further than FreeRTOS. The problem is that most projects I do these days require much more than that, e.g. networking, USB support, bluetooth, SD-Card file system, etc. Sure, you can cobble something together from various open source projects, but that's far from ideal. There used to be eCos which was pretty good but it seems to have passed into obscurity with nothing much to replace it. I was hoping Zephyr might finally fill this gap. These days I often find myself "upscaling" a design to use a Linux based system on module simply to get reliable networking, USB, bluetooth etc etc... Obviously that is not possible for many designs where cost or space is an issue.

[jnz]

Haha!! I’m so dumb!!!

I mistook Zephyr for Zerynth! I had just been looking at it and it didn’t even occur to me to really pay attention to the spelling.

If you take away the python part of Zerynth, there is a lot of overlap, actually.