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Not OP, but from a professional perspective I wouldn't say it's pain free. Your first issue is going to be figuring out whether your needs are even supported by

Not OP, but from a professional perspective I wouldn't say it's pain free. Your first issue is going to be figuring out whether your needs are even supported by the stack by going to [0]. I appreciate the difficulty of supporting hardware, but that much red would definitely have hurt it during RTOS selection for me. Second, what if the hardware people want to use the S3 because of availability concerns? There's no table I've ever found, you just have to troll through code and GitHub issues to figure it out. One other frustration is how obtuse the error messages can be. If west encounters a situation it doesn't like, it will often dump stack traces rather than print an error message. If you have something in the wrong directory or a typo etc, the magic in the build system often just fails and prints a generic error message or nothing at all. Maybe you screwed up the DT, maybe you named something incorrectly, maybe it's in the wrong directory, or maybe you typo'd. All of these can produce the same error messages at build time, which gets annoying. With that said, the zephyr experience is remarkably pain-free and Linux-like compared to some vendor toolchains and generally good enough that I advocate for it internally. [0] https://www.espressif.com/en/news/Zephyr_updates https://www.espressif.com/en/news/Zephyr_updates

ajross 4y ago
Some of that seems a little unfair. The desire in the first paragraph is for a fully-integrated, vendor-supplied SDK for a single board where everything works. The bit in the second is about doing configuration and integration work on new hardware. I think both criticisms are reasonable but they aren't from the same perspective. In this case, yes, Espressif (who I'm not affiliated with and don't want to speak for, though I have worked on the ESP32 -- it was actually Zephyr's launch hardware for SMP, as it happens) doesn't quite have everything wired up yet. And that's unfortunate, but not so much a ding at Zephyr as with this particular integration (other chip vendors, Nordic especially, tend to be farther along). And as for doing devicetree work... yeah, I don't like it either and try to stick to the kernel. But it's a ton cleaner than the kind of cut/paste you see with other solutions (and especially with whole-board IDE/SDKs!). In Zephyr, if you have a part that has an instance of some existing hardware integrated on another platform (a Synopsys DMA controller, some third-party I2C accelerometer, whatever), the configuration is usually/hopefully as simple as a three-line block of DTS with the addresses and interrupts filled in. For platform integrators, it's probably our single most attractive feature.

ajross 4y ago

Some of that seems a little unfair. The desire in the first paragraph is for a fully-integrated, vendor-supplied SDK for a single board where everything works. The bit in the second is about doing configuration and integration work on new hardware. I think both criticisms are reasonable but they aren't from the same perspective. In this case, yes, Espressif (who I'm not affiliated with and don't want to speak for, though I have worked on the ESP32 -- it was actually Zephyr's launch hardware for SMP, as it happens) doesn't quite have everything wired up yet. And that's unfortunate, but not so much a ding at Zephyr as with this particular integration (other chip vendors, Nordic especially, tend to be farther along). And as for doing devicetree work... yeah, I don't like it either and try to stick to the kernel. But it's a ton cleaner than the kind of cut/paste you see with other solutions (and especially with whole-board IDE/SDKs!). In Zephyr, if you have a part that has an instance of some existing hardware integrated on another platform (a Synopsys DMA controller, some third-party I2C accelerometer, whatever), the configuration is usually/hopefully as simple as a three-line block of DTS with the addresses and interrupts filled in. For platform integrators, it's probably our single most attractive feature.