Real time Operating systems are necessary for any IoT device to schedule and manage tasks in real time. When it comes to choose operating systems for your IoT products, preferring Zephyr for IoT development is one of the best options.
Why Zephyr for IoT Development?
One of the most popular real time OS for IoT development is FreeRTOS. However, it only provides only scheduling options. However, zephyr offers many advanced features that makes it a good option for your IoT products development. Lets have a look at some of the highlighting features of Zephyr OS.
Portable Across Multiple Hardwares:
Zephyr has a support for multiple hardware architectures. You can run the same code on the multiple hardwares like esp32, stm32 and nrf etc. by doing a little changes in device tree and configurations. For this reason, most of the device manufacturers prefer to adopt zephyr in their systems.
Lightweight and Efficient:
Mostly IoT devices have very limited resources. So, we cannot run operating systems like ubuntu, windows, android or Macos on them. However, zephyr is designed very minimally to run on IoT devices. Despite, its minimal nature, its very efficient in scheduling and managing tasks in real time.
Flexible and Scalable:
One of the most highlighted feature of zephyr is that it is very flexible and scalable. It has a linux like structure where you can enable and disable peripherals for your hardware from the device tree easily instead of writing code manually. Furthermore, It is highly scalable and can be seamlessly scaled for small microcontrollers to much powerful processors.
Security:
Security in IoT devices is one of the big reason that most of the IoT developers prefer to use Zephyr in their projects. According to IoT analystics, 90% of the IoT devices send data over cloud via Internet. So they are always prone to cyber attacks. Therefore, security for IoT devices have always been a big issue. Zephyr comes with multiple features to tight security in embedded systems and IoT devices. One of the most important security feature is secure bootloaders ensuring that only authenticated code runs on device. Other crucial security features include hardware cryptography support and network-level security protocols like DTLS and TLS. Although zephyr is opensource but still it has dedicated team to ensure security in zephyr OS.
Huge Opensource Community:
One of the feature that makes any software great is its opensource community who is always available for adding new features and supporting the new comers. Zephyr OS have a huge opensource community so you will able to find a lot of help about issues in your zephyr projects easily online. Apart from that, zephyr OS features are increasing rapidly as a large number of dedicated peoples are contributing in it on daily basis.
Advanced Debug Features:
Zephyr not only the development environment by separating the kernel and application layer, it also provides us with many advanced features for debugging like thread analyzer and GDB stub.
