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Amazon FreeRTOS – IoT operating system for microcontrollers
- simcop2387 9y agoIt might have been nice of them to change the name slightly to avoid confusion with the originating FreeRTOS. https://www.freertos.org/ https://www.freertos.org/
- RussianCow 9y agoAt the top of the page you linked to, I see this message: > The FreeRTOS kernel is now an AWS open source project, and these pages are being updated accordingly. Given that, the distinction probably isn't super important.
- simcop2387 9y agoGood catch I didn't see that announcement there. That does change things
- jore 9y agoIt seems it is exactly freeRTOS, but with some additional drivers and libs so not changing the name seems to be a good decision I think. I am wondering however if by using this os, the dev is obliged to use aws services. Isn't this more of a limitation than a benefit?
- dvfjsdhgfv 9y agoThat's a fair question. There definitely are people not wanting the additional stuff from Amazon.
- nerfhammer 9y agoFor example, probably most people using FreeRTOS thus far were using it for ordinary MCU stuff like listening for button presses and blinking LEDs without even involving a wifi transceiver at any point.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- michaelt 9y agoAccording to [1] "FreeRTOS remains open source, with no commitments. [...] FreeRTOS users are not required to be AWS customers in any way." Most likely Amazon's motivation is that they can make sure FreeRTOS makes using Amazon's services very easy; there are some IoT offerings that can't connect to Amazon's services, (or at least can't connect easily) [2] By making sure FreeRTOS can easily pull in the right libraries, they can make it easier for people to connect devices to AWS without compromising on secure encryption. [1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/announcing-freertos-kernel-v10/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/announcing-freertos-... [2] Last time I checked, Amazons MQTT service required TLS1.2 and an esp8266 only supported TLS1.1
- ronsor 9y agoThe latest axtls port for esp8266 supports TLS 1.2.
- rickycook 9y agoi would assume it’s like amazon linux; rhel with extras to make amazonization easy... but freertos rather than rhel
- jotux 9y ago>Amazon FreeRTOS is based on the FreeRTOS kernel, a popular open source operating system for microcontrollers, and extends it with software libraries that make it easy to securely connect your small, low-power devices to AWS cloud services like AWS IoT Core or to more powerful edge devices running AWS Greengrass.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- lultimouomo 9y agoIs this like the sample projects Microsoft makes available for interfacing a variety of development boards to their IoT hub [0] (a few of which use FreeRTOS), or is there something more to it? As usual the AWS docs are rich in inspiring buzz-words and very poor in explaining what the thing actually does. Not that Azure is better in that regard... [0] https://catalog.azureiotsuite.com/ https://catalog.azureiotsuite.com/
- revelation 9y agoIn this case it seems Amazon outright acquired whoever was maintaining FreeRTOS and has made it available under an MIT license: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/announcing-freertos-kernel-v10/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/announcing-freertos-... So presumably they have bigger plans beyond examples.
- lultimouomo 9y agoOk, now I get it. The core of the announcement is that they're doing with FreeRTOS what Apple did with CUPS, basically (plus the MIT relicensing). On the one hand, it feels like a power grab; on the other hand, one can only hope that it might bring some sorely needed standards of decency in the IoT world...
- nickpsecurity 9y agoI'm a bit confused. I guessed he was selling it with Wittenstein given (a) they have commercial licenses for the same source and (b) one of their docs said he helped set up the High Integrity Division of Wittenstein. That link makes me wonder what impact they had at all on FreeRTOS. https://www.highintegritysystems.com/openrtos/ https://www.highintegritysystems.com/openrtos/ Note that I don't follow FreeRTOS's closely. I just discovered it searching for RTOS's with Wittenstein looking at who was doing safety-certified RTOS's. At least back then, it was neat to think someone's RTOS project was getting adoption in the commercial sector with some money going back to them. Now I wonder...
- revelation 9y ago
- JoshTriplett 9y agoThe most useful aspect of this, from my perspective: they've finally abolished the non-FOSS license of the old FreeRTOS, and released it under an actually Open Source license, namely MIT. That's one less headache to deal with.
- revelation 9y agoIt's a nice present from Amazon. They should keep doing this, I'd like a MIT licensed QNX next please. God knows they have the money.
- JoshTriplett 9y agoGPL would be fine too; I'd just like something that actually qualifies as FOSS, rather than something proprietary.
- apple4ever 9y agoGPL is also a non-FOSS license. It says it is, but its not. Can't wait until the GPL is a rarely used license.
- JoshTriplett 9y agoIt meets the Free Software definition, the OSD, and the DFSG. And even anti-copyleft zealots rarely descend as far as to attempt to claim (falsely) that it isn't a FOSS license, rather than simply complaining that they find it distasteful.
- finnn 9y agoWould you care to elaborate on what you believe makes the GPL a non-FOSS license?
- bri3d 9y agoIt definitely limits the freedom of both the author and user, by restricting the means in which the software may be distributed and the limiting author's right to add additional restrictions (the "all distributions must adhere to these restrictions but can't add more" clause which makes it incompatible with the Apple App Store, for example). It's "Free" in the Free Software Foundation sense but not really in the way some people think of "freedom."
- roymurdock 9y agoFor those looking for context around this acqui-hire/stewardship, here's our take from late 2016 when Silicon Labs acquired FreeRTOS competitor Micrium: Going forward, we expect to see non-traditional IoT software and infrastructure platform vendors looking closely at the embedded OS space. A compelling OS offering could drive millions of device signups for IoT services platforms, such as AWS IoT, Microsoft Azure, and GE Predix, which derive recurring revenue from services rendered to an installed base of devices. Onboarding an OS offering (or complementing Windows 10 IoT Core with an MCU-focused OS in Microsoft’s case) would allow these players to potentially hook analytics and connectivity services into a portion of the billions of MCUs that are shipped yearly, bumping up services revenue substantially. We see this acquisition as a substantial, missed opportunity for leading MCU vendors, such as Renesas, Microchip/Atmel, and Qualcomm/NXP/Freescale, who we had shortlisted as likely acquirers. Micrium competitors Express Logic and WITTENSTEIN would be rational targets for the next round of RTOS acquisitions. We had expected Microsoft to refocus its attention on the MCU space (perhaps with a derivative of WinCE) but they have been more focused on providing runtimes for maker boards and playing catch up with AWS, than building out the bottom end of their OS portfolio. Ditto Google with Android Things. Think this is a great move on Amazon's part providing, but not forcing, an easy on-ramp to AWS for the billions of MCU-powered devices that ship every year.
- Hasz 9y agoWhat's the advantage of a RTOS?
- dmoy 9y agoBeen awhile since I dealt with microcontrollers, but my recollection is that some non-trivial amount of things have to be done by a RTOS. For example if your thing is attached to a sensor that spits out 47 bytes of sensor data every N clock cycles, and has a buffer that is 94 bytes, then you damn well better be reading that thing every N*2 clock cycles with a hard guarantee that your routine is finished copying all 94 bytes of data by the time it finishes (including time for interrupts). This gets complicated when you have specific requirements about when data is available or other things too (e.g. if reading data requires pulling pin X low, waiting at least Y clock cycles, and then reading all data in no more than Z clock cycles before returning pin X back to high, then good luck doing that in a normal OS where you have no hard time guarantees).
- HankB99 9y agoTwo models are common in embedded systems: "main loop" or RTOS. In the main loop model, once initialization is complete, the program loops indefinitely, servicing various functions. Since the developer is responsible for a larger portion of the code, it is easier to meet timing deadlines. An RTOS provides a convenience to allow various threads to block and thus simplify programming. I would choose an RTOS where there are a greater number of independent tasks which need to be performed. Both are alternatives to a conventional OS which makes hitting deadlines difficult or impossible.
- nitrogen 9y agoAn additional advantage of some kind of RTOS, or at least using interrupts: infinite looping uses more power than sleeping and waiting for interrupts.
- ianhowson 9y agoIt's worth noting that very few devices using an RTOS actually have real-time constraints. In practice, "RTOS" just means "operating system for an embedded device".
- wiradikusuma 9y agoWhat devices (not chip) on the market that they support? I can't seem to find it anywhere.
- Rebelgecko 9y agoThey list 4 dev boards on their website, from Microchip, NXP, STM and TI. With the exception of the PIC from microchip it looks like they are all ARM based. Will be exciting to see if the ESP 32 becomes supported, since it already supports regular FreeRTOS
- MrBuddyCasino 9y agoAnd they already habe AWS IoT support in their SDK.
- brutus1213 9y agoI'm curious if there are commercial deployments on these types of IoT platforms? Last time I looked, it all seemed like devkits and examples and such. One project I was following - mbed from ARM - it is quite unclear if it ever made it beyond hobbyist/prototyping usage.
- ramzyo 9y agoAgreed, a market survey of some sort would be helpful.
- retSava 9y agoIn the FAQ they mention that >64kB RAM is required. That doesn't answer your question, but it helps narrow down the answer. It runs over MQTT.
- natvert 9y agoHow do ppl like freertos vs zephyr vs nuttx? Have any real comparisons been done? Both on flexibility (platform support and code portability... I know... Nuttx, POSIX) and performance (interrupts, context switching, etc) I've been looking at zephyr which seems all around better, albeit a bit less mature. I have no hard data though... Hence this question.
- HankB99 9y agoThe "Get Started For Free" button on the front page has an ominous ring to it. I wonder (hope!) that the free version available from FreeRTOS.org remains available w/out an AWS account.
- LeifCarrotson 9y agoAmazon has ownership of FreeRTOS.org now, but the good news is that they are licensing it under the MIT license. Even if they hide the official download link behind an AWS login, there will be plenty of public mirrors. This is actually an improvement over the old "FreeRTOS open source license", which was basically the GPL plus: > FreeRTOS may not be used for any competitive or comparative purpose, including the publication of any form of run time or compile time metric, without the express permission of Real Time Engineers Ltd. A strange exception, which ostensibly prevented you from running benchmarks? But the GPL prohibits the addition of such clauses? But now it's just plain MIT. Super easy.
- ausjke 9y agoReally nice move, hopefully FreeRTOS becomes _the_ OS for those IoT MCUs similar what Linux does to higher end CPUs. It's always amazing to see many great OSS projects are primarily done by an individual while becoming extremely useful for so many.
- MichaelMoser123 9y ago>Amazon FreeRTOS ... and extends it with software libraries that make it easy to securely connect your small, low-power devices to AWS cloud services why do IoT devices have to connect to the cloud? Is there any legitimate use case other than reporting data gathered on the customer? Why do have all these gadgets have to snoop on us?
- patja 9y agoWhen I think of IoT I think of devices gathering data, and the data has to go somewhere to be useful. What's the alternative to putting it in the cloud, self-hosting the storage? That's what I would do, but I think it is a pretty niche market who wants to deal with the storage, backing it up, etc.
- recursor 9y agoIMHO the apps should be storage agnostic, with setup including choosing storage (possibly including paid plans). Meditating that through a standardised storage connector would mean the IoT apps have very little to do. That could be something like SFTP, but there are some interesting things like https://remotestorage.io/ https://remotestorage.io/ that allow you to write your own storage provider so decentralised apps can choose their own data store/change storage later without changing the app.
- inamberclad 9y agoIf you're going to sell a consumer an internet connected device, they're probably going to assume that it'll work on its own and they can review and adjust things on a website (that isn't a 192.0.0.*)
- fgonzag 9y agoSadly, thats the IoT world I want to live in. All the devices communicate only through the internal network. This increases security a ton by default. If you want to use it outside your network, then you do it the old fashioned way, by setting up a vpn to your router.
- hoodoof 9y agoMy money is on Linux based RTOS platforms. It's a bit of a surprise that Amazon has backed a non-Linux horse in this race.
- ramzyo 9y agoNo existing Linux-based RTOS that I know of will run on a microcontroller. Not enough Flash for program memory or RAM for volatile storage. Can any useful Linux-based RTOS kernel fit into 1MB of non-volatile storage and use less than ~512KB RAM; would love to know of one if it exists!
- SAI_Peregrinus 9y agoReplied as a sibling, and it certainly doesn't qualify as useful, but Dmitry Grinberg wrote an ARM emulator for AVR, soldered a SIMM to a board with an ATMEGA1284P and an SD card on an SPI bus connection, and got Linux to boot. The 24MHz clock rate is effectively reduced to about 6.5kHz, but it might be possible to find a use for such a device.
- ramzyo 9y agoInteresting, thanks for sharing!
- SAI_Peregrinus 9y agoLinux is totally unsuitable for the vast majority of microcontroller tasks. It has way too much overhead, requires a 32-bit CPU with MMU (or a very slow emulator like Dmitry Grinberg made[1], but that takes 6 hours to boot.) Microcontrollers that FreeRTOS is used on are very often 8-bit or 16-bit jobs, and even the 32-bit ones often lack an MMU. Linux on a micro is like trying to go to the corner store to get beer in a C5 galaxy transport aircraft. [1] http://dmitry.gr/index.php?r=05.Projects&proj=07.+Linux+on+8bit http://dmitry.gr/index.php?r=05.Projects&proj=07.+Linux+on+8...
- InitialLastName 9y ago
- spraak 9y agoAmazon^WAmazing how four of the top page articles are about new Amazon products today.
- spraak 9y agoI guess an old IRC joke is lost on this audience?
- cyberferret 9y agoSide note: I see that some of the graphic assets on the a:freeRTOS site have "Amazon_Treadstone_..." in the names. I imagine "Treadstone" was the internal project name for this initiative? Nice shout out to the Bourne series...
- amq 9y agoHow does it compare to mbed-os?
- nicolas314 9y agoMbed OS supports a much wider range of boards and controllers: https://os.mbed.com/platforms/ https://os.mbed.com/platforms/
- yaantc 9y agombed is only for ARM based systems (license limitation, not technology related), and in the embedded world there's much more than ARM. FreeRTOS is easy to use on any and all CPU architectures, and is much more common. Actually, FreeRTOS is the most popular RTOS in the embedded world with Linux, and uptrending (see https://m.eet.com/media/1246048/2017-embedded-market-study.pdf https://m.eet.com/media/1246048/2017-embedded-market-study.p... slides 62/63). This is a survey of professional embedded developers, not newcomers. Notice than mbed doesn't even show up. My feel is that mbed can be attractive to newcomers in embedded (easiness), but has not (yet?) much traction with people already doing embedded dev.
- nicolas314 9y agoGood point: Mbed OS is only for ARM-based processors. The main difference lies in the vast number of drivers it offers, which is the reason why you already have 100+ supported boards today. In comparison, FreeRTOS would run on any MPU but without drivers you won't go far.
- kbumsik 9y agoI would say mbed is more like library ecosystem for ARM devices than OS. FreeRTOS is just a tiny microkernel that you can easily adapt it to any device.
- qualitytime 9y ago"NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory robots need to work in harsh environments, often on the edge of the known Universe." What?
- leafario 9y agoIt's edge devices man!
- qualitytime 9y agoDude, you think this Amazon Cloud Service will still be active when the messages are received? More important, will the device battery still be charged when it gets a response back?
- recursor 9y agoOften - as in traveling back and forth to the frontier. Wow, not only reached the edge of the obervable universe, but easily outpacing expansion and communicating back to a cloud service. FTL travel confirmed. FTL info confirmed.