Benjamin Cabé

Welcome to this new edition of your weekly…ish Zephyr update. I have been quite busy over the past few weeks, travelling to Embedded World and Zephyr Developer Summit, and it was hard to find time for this weekly blog.

Speaking of in-person events, you have only a few days left to apply to speak at the upcoming Zephyr Developer Summit Europe 2024, held as part of the Open Source Summit 2024 in Vienna, Austria, on September 16-18!

Deferred device initialization

There have been many discussions in the past few months around improving the flexibility of Zephyr device model, in particular around making it possible to defer the initialization of a device. There are many reasons why one may want to decouple the instantiation of a device from its actual initialization, and whether a device should actually be fully initialized is often a decision worth making at runtime (ex. several devices may be sharing common resources, and only one such device may be actually active at a given point in time).

Now that pull request #67335 has been merged, any device may use the zephyr,deferred-init property in Devicetree to indicate they shouldn’t be automatically initialized but, rather, leave this step to the discretion of the programmer by means of the new device_init() API.

Relocation of ARM ELF binaries

In the context of LLEXT (linkable loadable extensions), it is important for Zephyr to be able to process an ELF binary “on the fly” as it needs to relocate the various sections of the file to the proper memory sections. PR #70452 introduced support for all the relocation types for ARM ELF files (i.e. partial and shared linking are now also properlu supported) making it possible to address even more scenarios which, if you think about the new “deferred initialization” mode, may very well include dynamically loading new device drivers in the not so distant future 🙂

Boards & SoCs

As there were a lot of things happening over the past three weeks, this section really focuses on the main highlights — please don’t be mad at me if I forgot something significant (and please comment to help correct the mistake!).

• Historically, running Zephyr application on Espressif ESP32 devices involved a second-stage bootloader as the initial bootloader was always the ESP-IDF bootloader. A new “simple boot” mode now allows to build applications that don’t require this second-stage bootloading. This makes for optimized memory and size, and is now the default option when building for ESP32, but MCUboot remains a possible alternative. (PR #70505)
• Renesas SmartBond SoCs now have power management support, and MCU can now enter low-power mode when needed. (PR #61857)
• Frame-pointer based stack unwinding for RISC-V architecture. (PR #69912)
• Improved coredump for RISC-V 64 bits: it now includes all the registers. (PR #70949)

There’s quite a few new boards whose support has been added, including:

• Raspberry Pi 5. (PR #70538)
• Arduino UNO R4 WiFi. (PR #71041)
• STM32L152C Discovery kit. (PR #70765)
• Renesas R-CAR Spider S4 (ARM64). (PR #68141)
• ESP32-S2 and ESP32-S3 Devkit-C. (PR #66462 and #66463)
• Phytec phyBOARD-Electra AM64x. (PR #70965)
• Waveshare ESP32-S3-Touch-LCD-1.28. (PR #67311)

Drivers

• Added a driver for the output diagnostics of the TLE9104 low-side switch. (PR #67029)
• New driver for CHSC6X round display controller, found e.g. on the Seeed Studio Round Display for XIAO. (PR #71073)
• Add support for half-duplex (3-wire) to the SPI controller driver for Raspberry Pi Pico. (PR#69634)
• New input driver for PAW32XX mouse sensors. (PR #71716)
• New driver for Analog Devices AD569x series of low-power output DACs. (PR #71338)
• New loopback disk driver allowing to transparently read/write from/to a file on the filesystem. (PR #69895)
• New driver for ST7796S LCD display controller. (PR #69991)
• Added Altera FPGA bridge support. (PR #71360)
• New I3C driver for Nuvoton NPCX SoCs. (PR #71366)
• Added Murata NCP15XH103 compensation table to generic thermistor driver. (PR #70912)

Miscellaneous

• For architecture that have MMU supported (and enabled!), it is now possible to memory map thread stacks, making it possible to create guard pages that can help catching stack overflows/underflows. (PR #70810)
• A lot of work is going into the Eclipse hawkBit client, to make it more configurable. (see e.g. PR #68806)
• High-speed support has been improved in the new USB device stack, and it’s now USB 2.0 compliant. (PR #67749)
• A new I3C shell module has been introduced. (PR #70773)
• west’s built-in support for generating SPDX SBOM files has been updated to now support SPDX 2.3 (vs. 2.2 before). The main addition is the ability to indicate the PrimaryPackagePurpose for each package. (PR #70581)
• The Wi-Fi shell module now allows to configure multiple security modes for each network. (PR #71044)
• The code samples for Bluetooth Heartrate monitor have been updated to support extended advertising and hence be long-range compatible on SoCs that support Bluetooth Low Energy Coded PHY. (PR #70257)

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A big thank you to the 31 individuals who had their first pull request accepted since my last post, 💙 🙌: @arnebdr, @ahaslam2, @achech, @Lahyllas, @ulmanyar, @lkoudelka, @franc0is, @nicogou, @lluiscampos, @jan-kubiznak, @petarsusac, @adityaganesh, @erang20, @nordic-bami, @hardeepsharma95, @ke6zfi, @alvsun, @hansbinderup, @rob-the-dude, @orangecms, @selescop, @doeni98, @jomigo96, @nxpadamm, @nlebedenco, @ABESTM, @SaintNicholas, @gkrulce, @nordic-babu, @raintamer, and @DmytroYaskov.

As always, I very much welcome your thoughts and feedback in the comments below!

If you enjoyed this article, don’t forget to subscribe to this blog to be notified of upcoming publications! And of course, you can also always find me on Twitter and Mastodon.

Catch up on all previous issues of the Zephyr Weekly Update:

Happy Friday! Welcome back for another edition of the Zephyr Weekly Update… with two weeks worth of news this time around 🙂

In case you missed it, I highly recommend you catch up the recording of this week’s Zephyr Tech Talk. We discussed the new hardware model introduced for the upcoming Zephyr 3.7 release, the kind of use cases it allows to address, and what you need to do to migrate your existing board definitions. We had well over 200 people attending—a record!

And now, for some of the things that recently landed in the main Zephyr tree…

Use host networking stack in native simulator

The native simulator is getting a lot of love recently, and a noteworthy improvement is the fact that there is now a way to directly use the host’s networking stack, which means it’s now much easier to leverage networking in the simulator, without having to rely on TUN/TAP interfaces and error-prone configuration scripts.

Read more in the documentation of the native simulator. (PR #65116)

“Cooked mode” capture

On the topic of networking, it is now possible to perform so-called “cooked mode capture” of network traffic. In a nutshell, this means that it’s now possible to capture the packets that are being sent and received by the Zephyr networking stack without requiring a physical network interface to be present.

More details on how this works in the documentation, as well as the dedicated net-capture code sample. (PR #70926)

Boards & SoCs

• Seeed Studio XIAO Expansion Board is a cheap yet very complete expansion shield for boards with the XIAO form factor. It includes an OLED display, a microSD card slot, an RTC, and plenty of Grove connectors. Thanks Charles for adding support for it in(PR #69999!
• ST B-LCD40-DSI1 is a shield with a 4″ WVGA TFT LCD with MIPI DSI interface and a capacitive touchscreen. (PR #70350)
• WeAct Studio MiniSTM32H743 Core board features a STM32H743VIT6 (Cortex-M7 @ 480 MHz), 2MB of Flash, and 2x 8MB of external Flash. (PR #69267)
• M5Stack ATOM Lite is a tiny ESP32-PICO-D4 based devkit with an RGB LED, an infra-red LED, and a Grove connector. The really small form factor makes it one of my favorite targets for quick ESP32 tests. (PR #68190)
• Several new drivers for some NXP peripherals:
  • ESAI (Enhanced Serial Audio Interface), used for serial communication with e.g. DSPs, S/PDIF transceivers, … (PR #68875)
  • ENET QOS (Ethernet QoS).(PR #70637)
  • hwinfo now available for RW SoCs. (PR #70456)

General drivers

• STTS22H is an ultralow-power, high-accuracy, digital temperature sensor, with an operating range of -40 °C to +125 °C. (PR #68356)
• Aosong DHT20 temperature and humidity sensor (sometimes found as Aosong AHT20, or Aosong AM2301B, don’t ask me why). (PR #67279)
• Angst+Pfister oxygen sensors from the MDLx5 series. (ex. FCX-MLD25 & FCX-MLD95). (PR #68689)
• onsemi MT9M114 is a 1/6″ 1.26 Megapixel CMOS digital image sensor and the Zephyr driver for it was significantly reworked to improve framerate and support more resolutions. (PR #70237)
• Cellular modem drivers can now expose IMEI and ICCID info. (PR #69217)
• New GNSS Driver for U-BLOX M10. (PR #68350)
• New driver for Sitronix CF1133 touchscreen controller. (PR #68321)
• New driver for Cirque Pinnacle 1CA027 trackpads. (PR #69438)
• ST LIS2DUX12 accelerometer (ultralow-power 3-axis smart accelerometer, with anti-aliasing filter) is now supported. (PR #65259)
• Existing MPU6050 has been reworked to now also support MPU6500. (PR #70130)

Miscellaneous

• LVGL module has been updated to v8.4.0, and LVGL 9 support is imminent! (PR #70470)
• A significant overhaul of the Virtual LAN (VLAN) implementation . (PR #70345)
• CONFIG_NET_SOCKETS_POSIX_NAMES Kconfig option is being deprecated. You can read more about why in the migration guide entry that was created for this change. (PR #69950)
• ram_report and rom_report West targets now show the address of the objects in the output reports. (PR #69542)
• RTT Shell backend now detects the presence of a host, preventing deadlocks in situations where the shell would end up continually writing to RTT. (PR #68941)
• Added support to configure BSSID in Wi-Fi connect command. (PR #70024)
• mDNS responder used to make it mandatory to have all the records set at compile time. It is now possible to provide the records at runtime. (PR #60271)
• POSIX:
  • Added support for clock_getres(). (PR #70525)
  • Added support for pthread_rwlockattr_setpshared(). (PR #70421)
  • Added support for pthread_attr_getinheritsched() and pthread_attr_setinheritsched(). (PR #68470)
  • Added support for pthread_setschedprio(). (PR #71001)
  • Added missing implementations for POSIX networking API calls. (PR #70635)

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A big thank you to the 24 individuals who had their first pull request accepted in the past couple weeks, 💙 🙌: @mayankmahajan-nxp, @swkim101, @fpistm, @erian747, @zakport, @benni44, @clemdy, @ZhaoxiangJin, @zejiang0jason, @akscram, @RickBruyninckx, @kdunn926, @raffarost, @jatedev, @cliu5764, @glneo, @23131dw, @HesselM, @arikgreen, @ringlej, @bmulder-innoseis, @mdubielx, @ct-fk, and @javanlacerda.

As always, I very much welcome your thoughts and feedback in the comments below!

If you enjoyed this article, don’t forget to subscribe to this blog to be notified of upcoming publications! And of course, you can also always find me on Twitter and Mastodon.

Catch up on all previous issues of the Zephyr Weekly Update:

Welcome back for another weekly update about all things that happened in Zephyr land! Without further ado, let’s dive into the highlights of the past week.

Using CLion for Zephyr development

There is always a lot of questions from people new to Zephyr on what IDE they should be using (if any), and suggestions for setting it up for Zephyr development.

It is really nice to see that the folks over at JetBrains took some time to document the instructions for using CLion to develop and debug Zephyr application, and I really encourage you to give them a try!

UART over Bluetooth LE

You may remember the Zephyr Tech Talk episode from a few weeks back where Luis Ubieda presented the work he’s been doing around making it easier to use UART over Bluetooth LE.

With PR #69881, a new implementation of Nordic UART Service (NUS) is provided. It essentially exposes to characteristics for RX/TX, allowing to mimic a UART over BLE.

A dedicated nus-console snippet makes it really easy to user UART over BLE for the Zephyr console, by allowing to redirect serial console output to a UART over NUS Devicetree instance.

MPU Support on Xtensa

MMU support was added a little while back, and it’s great to see that MPU (Memory Protection Unit) is now supported on Xtensa architectures.

PR #67938.

Boards & SoCs

• Nuvoton NuMaker M2L31KI evaluation board is a Cortex-M23 based development board running at 72MHz and targeting IoT applications. (PR #70357)
• Pin mappings for ST Morpho connector of supported STM32 Nucleo G0 boards have been added with PR #69693.
• Many new peripherals have been added to the NXP RW612 SoC port, from DMA to Flash driver, counters, I2C, …. (see e.g. PR #70192)

General drivers

There were several interesting improvements around Ethernet support:

• You can now use Ethernet drivers in “raw” mode (i.e. without building the L2 layer / MAC support). See CONFIG_ETH_DRIVER_RAW_MODE. (PR #70030)
• It is now possible to do Ethernet MAC address filtering. (PR #69385)

And also:

• MAX31790 is a 6-Channel PWM Fan RPM Controller. The existing PWM controller driver has been extended to now be a “multi-function device” (MFD) driver that also allows to access the “sensor” side of this IC, i.e retrieve the fan speed and fan fault information for each channel.
• The new-ish driver for the Pixart PMW3610DM (low-power laser mouse sensor) now exposes more configuration options, ex. to set the resolution, enable “smart mode”, etc.). (PR #70248)

Miscellaneous

• Zephyr API overview documentation page now indicates the stability level of each API. There are still many instances where the information is missing but surfacing this information will make it easier to improve and clean it up over time. (PR #61994)
• In order to help not flood logs with log messages that are repetitive, new LOG_WARN_ONCE() macro will write a WARNING level message to the log on the first execution only. (PR #70282)
• Ahead of the upcoming Zephyr Tech Talk about the new hardware model, some great work was done to explain the terminology inherent to SoCs and boards in the context of Zephyr. (PR #69802)

• Percepio module has been updated to use TraceRecorder v4.8.2 and DevAlert (DFM) v2.1.0. (PR #68490)
• POSIX:
  • Added support for pthread_attr_getscope() and pthread_attr_setscope(). (PR#68450)
  • Added support for confstr(). (PR #70274)

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A big thank you to the 10 individuals who had their first pull request accepted this week, 💙 🙌: @MarinaKalashina, @Arunmanialagarsamy, @vidarbe, @SamyFrancelet, @su47flying, @grb72t3yde, @ad8sweera, @jgenssler-GiN, @ldaj00, and @eriktamlin.

As always, I very much welcome your thoughts and feedback in the comments below!

If you enjoyed this article, don’t forget to subscribe to this blog to be notified of upcoming publications! And of course, you can also always find me on Twitter and Mastodon.

Catch up on all previous issues of the Zephyr Weekly Update: