Comment: ARM stirs up a storm with free OS

ARM has thrown a large rock into the free-RTOS pool. The processor firm’s plans to offer a free operating system as part of its mbed development platform could see it competing with one-time software partners.

One observer has even likened it to Google’s move into open source operating systems with Android.

The mbed OS is being presented as a free operating system for ARM Cortex-M processor-based embedded systems designs for internet of things (IoT) devices. Will this change the game of designing IoT applications, an area of embedded development which is beset by multiple standards and various embedded operating systems?

As you would expect, ARM has wrapped into the software all the fundamental IoT functions – security, communications interfaces and device management. It is already available to mbed partners for early development, and ARM expects first production devices next year.

Designing IoT devices can be a bit of a standards maze, but ARM has not taken sides: all the main protagonists are supported – Bluetooth Smart, 2G, 3G, LTE and CDMA mobile, ZigBee 802.15.4/6LoWPAN, and Google’s ZigBee look-alike Thread standard, plus of course 802.11 Wi-Fi.

There is software support for TLS/DTLS, CoAP, HTTP, MQTT and Lightweight M2M.

ARM does not want to kill the OS suppliers. It wants to join them and then let the user decideas it does with its compilers.

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