We are pleased to announce the release of Zephyr kernel version 1.9.0
Major enhancements planned with this release include:
- Bluetooth 5.0 Support (all features except Advertising Extensions)
- Bluetooth Qualification-ready BLE Controller
- BLE Mesh
- Lightweight Machine to Machine (LwM2M) support
- Pthreads compatible API
- BSD Sockets compatible API
- MMU/MPU (Cont.): Thread Isolation, Paging
- Expand Device Tree support to more architectures
- Revamp Testsuite, Increase Coverage
- Stack Sentinel support (See details below)
The following sections provide detailed lists of changes by component.
Kernel
- Added POSIX thread IPC support for Kernel
- kernel: introduce opaque data type for stacks
- Timeslicing and tickless kernel improvements
Architectures
- arm: Added STM32F405, STM32F417, STM32F103x8 SoCs
- arm: Added TI CC2650 SoC
- arm: Removed TI CC3200 SoC
- arm: Added MPU support to nRF52, STM32L4, and STM32F3
- xtensa: Added ESP32 support
- Stack sentinel: This places a sentinel value at the lowest 4 bytes of a stack
memory region and checks it at various intervals, including when servicing
interrupts or context switching. - x86: enable MMU for application memory
- ARC: added initial MPU support, including stack sentinel checking for ARC configurations not featuring hardware stack bounds checking
- ARC: nested interrupt support for normal, non-FIRQ interrupts
Boards
- Added device tree support for Intel Quark based microcontroller boards
such as Arduino_101, tinytile, and Quark_d2000_crb. - arm: Added Atmel SAM4S Xplained board
- arm: Added Olimex STM32-E407 and STM32-P405 boards
- arm: Added STM32F412 Nucleo and STM32F429I-DISC1 boards
- arm: Added TI SensorTag board
- arm: Removed TI CC3200 LaunchXL board
- arm: Added VBLUno51 and VBLUno52 boards
- xtensa: Added ESP32 board support
- ARC: added support for EMSK EM7D v2.2 version (incl. MPU)
- ARC: board configuration restructuring, peripheral configs moved from soc to board level
Drivers and Sensors
- KW40Z IEEE 802.15.4 radio driver support added
- APDS9960 sensor driver added
- Added TICKLESS KERNEL support for nrf RTC Timer
- Added Kinetis adc and pwm drivers
- Removed deprecated PWM driver APIs
- Added ESP32 drivers for GPIO, pin mux, watchdog, random number generator,
and UART - sensor: Add BMM150 Geomagnetic sensor driver
Networking
- LWM2M support added
- net-app API support added. This is higher level API that can be used
by applications to create client/server applications with transparent
TLS (for TCP) or DTLS (for UDP) support. - MQTT TLS support added
- Add support to automatically setup IEEE 802.15.4 and Bluetooth IPSP networks
- TCP receive window support added
- Network sample application configuration file unification, where most of the
similar configuration files were merged together - Added Bluetooth support to HTTP(S) server sample application
- BSD Socket compatible API layer, allowing to write and/or port simple
networking applications using a well-known, cross-platform API - Networking API documentation fixes
- Network shell enhancements
- Trickle algorithm fixes
- Improvements to HTTP server and client libraries
- CoAP API fixes
- IPv6 fixes
- RPL fixes
Bluetooth
- Bluetooth Mesh support (all mandatory features and most optional ones)
- GATT Service Changed Characteristic support
- IPSP net-app support: a simplified networking API reducing duplication
of common tasks an application writer has to go through to connect
to the network. - BLE controller qualification-ready, with all required tests passing
- Controller-based privacy (including all optional features)
- Extended Scanner Filter Policies support in the controller
- Controller roles (Advertiser, Scanner, Master and Slave) separation in
source code, conditionally includable - Flash access cooperation with BLE radio activity
- Bluetooth Kconfig options have been renamed have the same (consistent)
prefix as the Bluetooth APIs, namely BT_* instead of BLUETOOTH_*.
Controller Kconfig options have been shortened to use CTLR instead of
CONTROLLER. - Removed deprecated NBLE support
Libraries
- mbedTLS updated to 2.6.0
- TinyCrypt updated to 0.2.7
HALs
- Added support for stm32f417 SOC
- Added support for stm32f405 SOC
- pinmux: stm32: 96b_carbon: Add support for SPI
- Added rcc node on stm32 socs
- Added pin config for USART1 on PB6/PB7 for stm32l4
- Removed TI cc3200 SOC and LaunchXL board support
Documentation
- CONTRIBUTING.rst and Contribution Guide material added
- Configuration options doc reorganized for easier access
- Navigation sidebar issues fixed for supported boards section
- Fixed link targets hidden behind header
- Completed migration of wiki.zephyrproject.org content into docs and
GitHub wiki. All links to old wiki updated. - Broken link and spelling check scans through .rst, Kconfig (used for
auto-generated configuration docs), and source code doxygen comments
(used for API documentation). - API documentation added for new interfaces and improved for existing
ones. - Documentation added for new boards supported with this release.
- Python packages needed for document generation added to new python
pip requirements.txt
Build System and Tools
- Convert post-processing host tools to python, this includes the following
tools: gen_offset_header.py gen_idt.py gen_gdt.py gen_mmu.py
Tests and Samples
- Added test Case to stress test round robin scheduling in schedule_api test.
- Added test case to stress test priority scheduling in scheduling_api_test.