Zephyr FPGA Controller | Hacker News Reader

Zephyr FPGA Controller

antmicro.com

25 pointsJoachimS9 comments

https://discord.com/invite/Ck7jw53nU2 - Zephyr just recently moved to Discord, and anyone can join AFAIK. It's not limited to the members. BTW Freescale merged into NXP, that's why it's not on any list any more :)

ZMK is an opensource keyboard firmware that is using zephyros. It has a working BLE stack and some other interesting things. Zephyr uses device tree structure for board definitions and makes it trivial to add 3rd party board drivers.

The thing that bothers me about Zephyr is that their slack is only accessible if you're employed by one of the big companies, intel, google, freescale etc.

So basically getting in touch with the developer community is kinda walled off and when it comes to debugging more detailed issues with a new boards dts files you're cut off because you're not important enough.

Yeah, I don't like the sound of that.

I Didn't know zmk was based on it.

In fact this is the first I've heard of it, started reading up on it all just now!

Is qmk also based on zephyros?

>Is qmk also based on zephyros?

Nope. QMK is a fork of TMK[0][1]. It also uses ChibiOS[2] for hardware abstraction layer for ARM MCUs[3].

[0] https://github.com/qmk/qmk_firmware/blob/master/docs/faq_gen...

[1] https://github.com/tmk/tmk_keyboard

[2] https://www.chibios.org/dokuwiki/doku.php

[3] https://github.com/qmk/qmk_firmware/blob/master/docs/platfor...

ChibiOS HAL was pretty stale for a while but has recently picked up steam again. Nuvoton devices were recently added(I worked on getting a ducky keyboard merged into QMK).

The good thing about the ChibiOS HAL is that it is fairly simple. The problem with it is that you need to write drivers from scratch and when something doesn't quite fit its concept it becomes really annoying to add.

The thing that bothers me about Zephyr is that their slack is only accessible if you're employed by one of the big companies, intel, google, freescale etc.

I do not believe this is true, nor has it been for quite a long time.

As a private individual I was on their Slack at least two years ago, And they recently moved to a public Discord group.

It doesn't matter whether you want to believe it or not. I wrote freescale, but it's actually incorrect. Freescale is not on the list. I've been running around trying to find someone to invite me into the workspace until I finally lost interest. Here's the slack link:

https://zephyrproject.slack.com/signup#/domain-signup

You can use any account with the domain:

    intel.com
    linaro.com
    linux.intel.com
    nordicsemi.no
    nxp.com
    oticon.com
    foundries.io
    ti.com
    synopsys.com
    antmicro.com
    sifive.com
    teenage.engineering
    lairdconnect.com
    adafruit.com
    eclipse-foundation.org
    google.com
    chromium.org
    windriver.com

Don’t have an email address from one of those domains? Contact the workspace administrator at Zephyr for an invitation.

I recently tried to use Zephyr on an nRF9160 and looked into the MQTT example. I was pretty disappointed. Its C only, the examples are littered with #ifdefs, because for some reason they forced support for 28 different platforms in the same example file and I couldn't really grasp it in a short time.

On the other hand, when I tried the same thing with Embedded Rust, I was up and running quicker, but am now missing a no_std MQTT library.

I had high hopes for Zephyr, and maybe I have to give it a fair chance again, but as of now, I don't feel it.

In the context of FPGAs: better tooling for that would be pretty dope. Coming from software dev, it is quite hard to get used to all the proprietary tools and weird workflows. I successfully got around ever using vendor tools for microcontrollers, but for FPGAs, that is still very hard.

I'm hoping that LLHD and CIRCT within the LLVM project really take of, to get some language and tooling innovation going in the space[*].

[*] or rather _open_ innovation -> I think there is some quite impressive proprietary stuff, but the open ecosystem is lacking behind the software world.

My SO has to use Zephyr at work.

Two of the things they complain the most are:

1. Zephyr is marketed as POSIX compliant, in practice it isn't.

2. TLS. There seems to be a bug due to which either all sockets are tls sockets, or none is.

I'm not an expert into this... But I'd look somewhere else for an embedded OS.

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