Developer Community Source model Open source | Working state pre-GA | |
Written in C (Mynewt OS)
Go language(Newt tool) Latest release 1.0.0-b1 / December 13, 2016; 2 months ago (2016-12-13) Platforms ARM Cortex-M0, ARM Cortex-M3, ARM Cortex-M4 |
Apache Mynewt OS
Apache Mynewt OS is a real-time, modular operating system for connected IoT devices that need to operate for long periods of time under power, memory, and storage constraints. It is an open-source project incubating under the Apache Software Foundation. The source code is distributed under the Apache License 2.0, a permissive license that is conducive to commercial adoption of open-source software.
Contents
- Apache Mynewt OS
- Overview
- Core OS Features
- Bluetooth Low Energy
- Supported Boards
- Package Management
- References
Overview
Apache Mynewt is a real time operating system with a rich set of libraries intended to make prototyping, deploying, and managing 32-bit microcontroller based IoT devices easy. It is highly composable, allowing the user to build embedded system applications (e.g. locks or medical devices or industrial IoT applications) across different types of microcontrollers. True to its name, the kernel of the OS is 6KB in size.
The OS is designed with connectivity in mind, and comes with a full implementation of Bluetooth Low Energy 4.2 stack. With the addition of BLE (supporting all Bluetooth 4.2 compliant security features except privacy) and various utilities such as the default file system, console, shell, logs, stats, etc., the image size is approximately 96 KB for the Nordic nRF51822 Bluetooth SoC. This size metric excludes the bootloader image.
Core OS Features
The core Apache Mynewt OS supports:[3]
Additional features and utilities of the operating system include:
Bluetooth Low Energy
The first network stack available in Apache Mynewt is Bluetooth Low Energy and is called NimBLE. It complies with Bluetooth Core Specification 4.2.
NimBLE includes both the host and controller components. Access to the controller source code makes the BLE performance highly configurable. For example, the BLE throughput can be adjusted by changing the connection intervals, data packet size, packet queue size etc. A use case requiring a large number of concurrent connections can similarly be configured, provided there is adequate RAM allocated. Example applications that demonstrate how to use available services are included in the package.
Supported Boards
The Operating System is designed for applications on embedded devices and is microcontroller architecture agnostic. Currently, it includes board support packages for the following:
Package Management
The project includes the Newt Tool which is a CLI-based smart source package management system for embedded systems development. Additionally, it allows the user to compose builds with specified packages and compiler options, generate images and their digital signatures, and finally download and debug the firmware on different targets.