Hidden Gems and Grand Visions for Zephyr: In Conversation with Benjamin Cabé
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In an interview, Benjamin Cabé, speaker at the Elektor online conference “Zephyr – The Open RTOS for Future Devices” on 5 November 2025 and Developer Advocate for the Zephyr project, clears up a widespread misconception: Zephyr is much more than just a real-time operating system.
Elektor: Why do you think Zephyr is often still too heavily reduced to its RTOS component?
Benjamin Cabé: That’s a good question! Zephyr is often seen as ‘just’ an RTOS kernel, but it’s much more than that, just as Ubuntu or CentOS are obviously much more than just the Linux kernel! Perhaps this is partly because Zephyr has its roots in decades of innovation in the field of real-time operating systems, and ten or fifteen years ago, the use cases were not nearly as diverse as they are today. Back then, ‘RTOS’ was one of the most important, defining parts of the stack, whereas today aspects such as connectivity, security, developer experience and much more also play a role and are areas where Zephyr really shines.
Elektor: What “hidden gems” in Zephyr would you particularly highlight that many users may have missed so far?
Benjamin Cabé: That would spoil the fun of my presentation on 5 November! But to get back to the point of the first question: Zephyr is much more than an RTOS and offers many great tools that help embedded developers focus on the actual writing of code. I think it really starts with West, the Swiss Army knife of every Zephyr developer, which helps them set up and maintain a development environment (including toolchains, which are notoriously tedious to set up). Twister, our test framework, can also do much more than you might initially think, because beyond unit and integration testing, it can help automatically test graphical user interfaces or even power consumption (for example, in CI)! And as I mentioned, I have a few more tricks up my sleeve so that the audience can learn a few new tricks during my presentation.
Elektor: How would you describe the learning curve difference between Zephyr and other embedded platforms?
Benjamin Cabé: Some of Zephyr’s greatest strengths can also be its weaknesses, at least initially. It is very powerful and flexible, which can make it seem a little intimidating at first. However, we have really great online documentation with hundreds of code examples that can serve as a starting point. And once you get past some of the initial hurdles (Devicetree, anyone?), things are actually very consistent and logical.
Elektor: How important is the ecosystem around Zephyr for its success – and how active is the community in its further development?
Benjamin Cabé: In my opinion, Zephyr is a perfect example of an open source project that combines the best of both worlds: strong community involvement and significant commitment from commercial companies. It’s one thing to be a successful open source project that developers enjoy contributing to – but it’s quite another to reach the point where Zephyr is used in millions of commercial products. Since day one, the project has been run under the umbrella of the Linux Foundation, which ensures a neutral governance model and a level playing field for all companies interested in using or contributing to Zephyr. Every month, dozens of new contributors join the project – from individuals who revise the documentation or add board support to companies that contribute important features. This steady growth and diversity are key to Zephyr’s sustainability and particularly gratifying for me as a developer advocate for the project.
Elektor: Are there any plans or developments that could position Zephyr even more strongly as a platform – for example, in the direction of DevOps integration or cloud connectivity?
Benjamin Cabé: There are already many options available today that facilitate the integration of Zephyr-based products into cloud backends, from basic protocol support (MQTT, CoAP, LwM2M, etc.) to functions for remote device management and much more. I am also very excited about the progress being made in security certification for the Zephyr kernel, an area that will certainly help Zephyr become even more of a market leader than it already is today. Oh, and edge AI too, with more and more libraries and modules enabling efficient inference directly on the device rather than relying on cloud integration.
For more information on Elektor’s online conference “Zephyr – The Open RTOS for Tomorrow’s Devices” on 5 November, see the conference website.
Register today!
Editor’s note: eeNews Europe is an Elektor International Media publication.
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