#009: Zephyr’s Meteoric Rise and What It Means for the Future of Embedded
Kate Stewart, VP of Dependable Embedded Systems at the Linux Foundation, explains how Zephyr RTOS evolved from Intel’s Wind River roots into a multi-vendor open-source project with a governance model designed to prevent corporate capture. She details Zephyr’s technical differentiators, including its Linux-inspired Kconfig and device tree, the pragmatic reuse of MCUboot, and the introduction of 5-year Long-Term Support (LTS) releases to meet regulatory demands like the EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA). The conversation covers Zephyr’s safety certification journey, its transparent CVE tracking, and its growing adoption by silicon vendors like Nordic and Arduino, as well as its expanding support for RISC-V and Rust.