On November 21, 2023, Microsoft announced that it was contributing Azure RTOS to the Eclipse Foundation, which gave birth to the Eclipse ThreadX project. Since then, the project team and Eclipse Foundation staff have been working tirelessly behind the scenes to transition ThreadX to a true community-driven open source project and ensure its continued certification for safety-critical applications. In this short post, I will review the major milestones of that first year and share what to expect from the team in 2025.
ThreadX v6.4.1
On February 28, 2024, the ThreadX project released version 6.4.1 of ThreadX and its companion modules. This release, the first made under the Eclipse Foundation development process, completed the transition of ThreadX to open source.
From a technical standpoint, there were no changes from the prior 6.4.0 release. And yet, v6.4.1 represents a significant milestone.The Eclipse Foundation intends to certify ThreadX v6.4.1 for safety-critical applications. You can find more information about our current certifications on the ThreadX Alliance website.
ThreadX Alliance
Certifying a codebase against stringent standards such as IEC 61508 and ISO 26262 can be expensive. This stems from the fact that certification involves working with third-party assessors who scrutinise not only the code but also the development process used. Naturally, those assessors do not work for free.
In October 2024, the Eclipse Foundation launched the ThreadX Alliance, a global initiative to sustain and promote the Eclipse ThreadX real-time operating system (RTOS) and its ecosystem. By joining the Alliance, organisations of all sizes can support the continued growth of the Eclipse ThreadX ecosystem, and ensure the continued certification of future versions. In other words: Eclipse ThreadX is the first and only open source real-time operating system in the market. If you like it, you should join the Alliance!New project lead
In November 2024, as the Eclipse ThreadX project was celebrating its first anniversary, a new project lead took over. Who is that lucky person, you will ask? None other than me!
Although I have managed the Foundation’s embedded and IoT programs since 2019, my résumé shows I am not an embedded engineer by trade. I can read and write C, but not at the level required by the best-performing open source RTOS on the market. Why, then, was I selected as the project lead? Well, I volunteered for one. But there is another reason. As the Eclipse Project Handbook eloquently states: “The project lead is not the technical lead. So it’s not strictly their responsibility to develop things like coding standards, project policies, and such. They are responsible, however, for making sure that those sorts of things get created and for making sure that the project team is working to complete shared goals.” In other words: I am jumping in to help coordinate things as our growing group of committers and contributors focuses on the code.What to expect in 2025
So, what should you expect from the ThreadX project in 2025? First, a public roadmap! We will use GitHub’s project management features to give our community a real-time view of what we plan to work on. Naturally, this will help us put out some releases. We aim to make available a v6.4.2 service release of most components during the first quarter. In parallel, our documentation will finally be available on threadx.io; I just need to complete that pesky migration from markdown to AsciiDoc. Bigger things will come later in the year. RISC-V is top-of-mind for our team, and we are discussing bringing ThreadX to open-source RISC-V-based cores and microcontrollers.
Naturally, we have too many ideas and too few developers. Let me know if you are interested in contributing to the ThreadX project. A quick email to threadx-info@eclipse.org is all you need to get started!
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