Following Arm’s decision to stop supporting Mbed from July 2026 onwards, Arduino has now decided to use Zephyr RTOS instead of Arm Mbed for Arduino boards that rely on the latter including Arduino GIGA, Arduino Nano 33 BLE, Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect, as well as Arduino PRO boards/solutions such as the Portenta, Nicla, and Opta families.
Note that Arduino UNO, MKR, and Nano families are not impacted by the change since their Arduino Core implementation does not rely on Mbed. The change is not going to happen overnight as software development takes time, and Arduino plans to release the first beta based on ZephyrOS by the end of 2024. and a rollout for various boards starting in 2025 long before Arm Mbed is phased out for good.
Arduino is not new to the Zephyr project as the company became a Silver member last year, and they were aware that Arm Mbed would be phased out before the rest of us. That means work to develop an Arduino core based on an underlying Zephyr layer has been going on for a while.
Since this is all low-level software, end users should not notice any differences when switching from an Arm Mbed-based Arduino Code to a Zephyr-based one since the Arduino APIs exposed by the abstraction layer should not change at all. The Zephyr project was first introduced in 2016 as a lightweight RTOS managed by the Linux Foundation and we’ve covered several products making use of Zephyr OS over the years.
Check out Arduino’s announcement if you want to learn more about the Zephyr RTOS switch, and you can also watch Arduino’s Martino Facchin interview Zephyr’s Benjamin Cabè at Arduino Days 2024 about four months ago.
The phasing out of Mbed will also impact other projects including BBC micro:bit and Raspberry Pi (Pico), and they’ll have to do a similar transition with Zephyr OS, FreeRTOS, NuttX, or another real-time operating system.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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… the winds of change..
In terms of an RTOS for uCs Zephyr is anything but lightweight
Arduino isn’t exactly known for being lightweight itself.
Raspberry Pi (pico) is already using FreeRTOS, but it will be interesting to see if they look in to Zephyr more or start an abstraction layer
Mned was such a nice and lightweight OS, just a wrapper around RTX. Now, we have to deal with a lot of shit.
You don’t HAVE to deal with anything. You can write bare metal code and do it all yourself.
Bet they haven’t yet discovered that Zephyr is all except a robust RTOS, it’s all LF marketing and fanfare… I’d like to see the face of Arduino developers debugging macros monstrosities…
In the news: Support dropped for yet another bloated attempt at a universal embedded OS, asks users to switch to different bloated attempt at a universal embedded OS.
Thanks alot