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Provides high level background material for Zephyr, to help newcomers easily determine its suitability for their needs. Change-Id: I2f843ad627024f601f163eafc7d965ecf44da8f9 Signed-off-by: Allan Stephens <allan.stephens@windriver.com>
54 lines
2.0 KiB
ReStructuredText
54 lines
2.0 KiB
ReStructuredText
.. _about_zephyr::
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About Zephyr
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############
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The Zephyr kernel is a small footprint kernel designed for use on
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resource-constrained systems, such as embedded sensor hubs,
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environmental sensors, simple LED wearables, and store inventory tags.
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Key Features
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************
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A Zephyr application consists of kernel code, device driver code, and
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application-specific code, which are compiled into a monolithic image
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executing in a single shared address space.
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The Zephyr kernel provides an extensive suite of services,
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which are summarized below.
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* Multi-threading services, including both priority-based, non-preemptive fibers
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and priority-based, preemptive tasks (with optional round robin time-slicing).
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* Interrupt services, including both compile-time and run-time registration
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of interrupt handlers, which can be written in C or assembly language.
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* Inter-thread signalling services, including binary sempahores,
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counting semaphores, and mutex semaphores.
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* Inter-thread data passing services, including basic message queues,
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enhanced message queues, and byte streams.
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* Memory management services, including dynamic allocation and freeing of
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fixed-size or variable-size memory blocks.
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* Power management services, including tickless idle and an advanced idling
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infrastructure.
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There are several additional features that distinguish Zephyr from
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other small footprint kernels.
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* Zephyr is highly configurable, allowing an application to incorporate only
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the capabilities it needs, and to specify their quantity and size.
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* Zephyr requires all system resources to be defined at compile-time
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to reduce code size and increase performance.
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* Zephyr provides minimal run-time error checking to reduce code size and
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increase performance. An optional error checking infrastructure is provided
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that can assist in debugging during application development.
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The Zephyr kernel is suppported on multiple architectures,
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including ARM Cortex-M, Intel x86, and ARC. The list of supported platforms
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can be found :ref:`here <platform>`.
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