Benjamin Cabé

Zephyr Weekly Update – Video Killed the Radio Star

Benjamin Cabé
Zephyr Weekly Update - May 23, 2025

Zephyr Weekly Update - May 23, 2025

Greetings, folks! Yeah, it’s been a few weeks… again! I blame the month of May in France that was filled with bridge days. Luckily, this means even more cool news for you to chew on!

Also, we have two upcoming Zephyr Tech Talks after a few quiet weeks, make sure to RSVP to the events so that you don’t miss the opportunity to ask your questions live (and please help spread the word by relaying to your social network, if you feel like it!).

Introducing support for Renesas RX

The Renesas RX family is a line of 32-bit microcontrollers from Renesas Electronics which is positioned as an alternative to Arm Cortex-M.

I personally have no first-hand experience with this architecture, but it seems to be pretty competitive with regards to pure performance, as well as power efficiency. Renesas RX MCUs are a pretty popular choice in applications such as industrial automation, motor control, and healthcare.

It’s not often that Zephyr adds support for a new processor architecture, so let’s celebrate! Also worth noting that the Zephyr SDK 0.17.1, which was just released, provides RX toolchains which you can use to easily build your first apps for the QEMU board or the Renesas Starter Kit for RX130.

Video updates

Zephyr has been shipping with video support for a long time, but over the last year or so, this area has regained interest from various parties and has been incredibly active.

Simplifying downstream patch management with west patch

The west patch command is not new, but it’s only recently that documentation for it was added, so I thought it was worth mentioning.

This command allows you to organize and apply patches to Zephyr or Zephyr modules in a controlled manner, by means of a patches.yml file that stores metadata about the various patches. It allows, for example, to indicate whether a given patch corresponds to an open pull request.

patches:
  - path: zephyr/my-zephyr-change.patch
    sha256sum: c676cd376a4d19dc95ac4e44e179c253853d422b758688a583bb55c3c9137035
    module: zephyr
    author: Obi-Wan Kenobi
    email: obiwan@jedi.org
    date: 2025-05-04
    upstreamable: false
    comments: |
      An application-specific change we need for Zephyr.
  - path: bootloader/mcuboot/my-tweak-for-mcuboot.patch
    sha256sum: e3b0c44298fc1c149afbf4c8996fb92427ae41e4649b934ca495991b7852b855
    module: mcuboot
    author: Darth Sidious
    email: sidious@sith.org
    date: 2025-05-04
    merge-pr: https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/zephyr/pull/<pr-number>
    issue: https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/zephyr/issues/<issue-number>
    merge-status: true
    merge-commit: 1234567890abcdef1234567890abcdef12345678
    merge-date: 2025-05-06
    apply-command: git apply
    comments: |
      A change to mcuboot that has been merged already. We can remove this
      patch when we are ready to upgrade to the next Zephyr release.

New boards and SoCs

Some of the other boards and SoCs that caught my attention. As a reminder, there’s a new board being added to Zephyr almost every day, so the list below is not exhaustive!

Drivers

uart-bridge {
         compatible = "zephyr,uart-bridge";
         peers = <&cdc_acm_uart0 &uart1>;
};

Miscellaneous

/ {
	#address-cells = < 0x1 >;          /* in zephyr/dts/common/skeleton.dtsi:10 */
	#size-cells = < 0x1 >;             /* in zephyr/dts/common/skeleton.dtsi:11 */
	model = "Wio Terminal";            /* in zephyr/boards/seeed/wio_terminal/wio_terminal.dts:15 */
	compatible = "seeed,wio-terminal"; /* in zephyr/boards/seeed/wio_terminal/wio_terminal.dts:16 */

	/* node '/chosen' defined in zephyr/dts/common/skeleton.dtsi:12 */
	chosen {
		zephyr,flash-controller = &nvmctrl;       /* in zephyr/dts/arm/atmel/samd5x.dtsi:52 */
		zephyr,entropy = &trng;                   /* in zephyr/dts/arm/atmel/samd5x.dtsi:51 */
		zephyr,sram = &sram0;                     /* in zephyr/boards/seeed/wio_terminal/wio_terminal.dts:19 */
		zephyr,flash = &flash0;                   /* in zephyr/boards/seeed/wio_terminal/wio_terminal.dts:20 */
		zephyr,code-partition = &code_partition;  /* in zephyr/boards/seeed/wio_terminal/wio_terminal.dts:21 */
		zephyr,display = &ili9341;                /* in zephyr/boards/seeed/wio_terminal/wio_terminal.dts:22 */
		zephyr,console = &board_cdc_acm_uart;     /* in zephyr/boards/common/usb/cdc_acm_serial.dtsi:9 */
		zephyr,shell-uart = &board_cdc_acm_uart;  /* in zephyr/boards/common/usb/cdc_acm_serial.dtsi:10 */
		zephyr,uart-mcumgr = &board_cdc_acm_uart; /* in zephyr/boards/common/usb/cdc_acm_serial.dtsi:11 */
		zephyr,bt-mon-uart = &board_cdc_acm_uart; /* in zephyr/boards/common/usb/cdc_acm_serial.dtsi:12 */
		zephyr,bt-c2h-uart = &board_cdc_acm_uart; /* in zephyr/boards/common/usb/cdc_acm_serial.dtsi:13 */
	};

...

A big thank you to the 73 (😬) individuals who had their first pull request accepted since my last post, 💙 🙌: @herculanodavi, @ZhaoQiang-b45475, @abhinavnxp, @batkay, @fiveohhh, @gudipudiramanakumar, @mefromac, @segerlund, @alexapostolu, @dsseng, @sayooj-atmosic, @edt-alex, @alrodlim, @Ole2mail, @cfunes-pragma, @cdrask, @wjklimek1, @squiniou, @Kronosblaster, @morishitaandre, @dependabot[bot], @PaulSchaetzle, @zbas, @sandro97git, @tobiwan88, @jsbatch, @gcopoix, @TomasBarakNXP, @mikolaj-klikowicz, @AnElderlyFox, @cbrake, @shiftee, @yolaval, @FKainka, @benson0715, @ct-lt, @Brandon-Hurst, @hdou, @jeremydick, @bastienjauny, @iwasz, @duerrfk, @ebmmy, @araneusdiadema, @srishtik2310, @jbr7rr, @mihnen, @muahmed-silabs, @leonmariotto, @conweek, @fmoessbauer, @AmaanSingh, @Harry-Martin, @ymleung314, @smfebe, @dantti, @meijemac, @thsieh97, @Vijayakannan, @vytvir, @kylebonnici, @tsi-chung, @yongxu-wang15, @anujdeshpande, @Lorl0rd, @minumn, @120MF, @cmm1981, @nordic-mik7, @dylanHsieh4963, @harristomy, @hfruchet-st, and @vignesh-aerlync.

As always, I very much welcome your thoughts and feedback in the comments below!

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