Lull'd By Soft Zephyr

Thea Aldrich assures Jonni Bidwell that with a well-designed  operating system IoT might not end humanity after all.

Thea Aldrich is a developer advocate for the Zephyr Project, a Linux Foundation project that aims to create an open source, real-time operating system for the Internet of Things (IoT). Before that she’s been involved with gathering and contributing geospatial data for the OpenStreetMap project as well as working for the Eclipse Foundation.

She’s also responsible for the first Ruminant Area Network we’re aware of – a quartet of cattle equipped with sensors – but we’re told that project has since been put out to pasture. We caught up with her at the Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit in the culture (and saturated fat)-rich city of Edinburgh to talk security, community and caring for your hair in wintery conditions.

Linux Format: Let’s talk about real-time operating systems (RTOSes) first. What are the situations where guaranteed low latency is required, why are conventional kernels insufficient here?

Thea Aldrich: One of the features in Zephyr that folks are most excited about are pre-emptive threading and being able to prioritise and have the core functionality that you really need to always be on and always work. That’s important, particularly for sensors and devices embedded into critical infrastructure, where if some component crashes or stops working or doesn’t respond in time, you can’t have it bring down the entire system.

Imagine if you’re driving a car and then you turn on Slack (this is a terrible example but let’s roll with it). You can’t have your engine suddenly stop when you try and connect your phone to your car. So for safety-critical applications and situations where you need to know exactly how the system is going to behave every time, it has to be highly predictable. Those are the cases where we need RTOSes.