 Hi, this is your Satyam Bhartiya and welcome to another episode here for Let's Talk. And today we have with us once again, Katie Stewart, vice president of Dependable Embedded Systems at the Linux Foundation. Katie's get to have you back on the show. Thank you very much. It's good to be back. Yeah, and you folks recently had your annual Ziffer Developer Summit in Prague, Jair Tripoli. I would love to hear a bit about this event. What kind of audience was there? And also, what kind of discussions? You know, of course, there were a lot of sessions, but when you go out and walk and talk to people, what kind of like team or discussions you were hearing this time? This Ziffer Developer Summit is aimed at developers. And this year we paired up with the Embedded Linux conference folk. And so it was very much embedded. It was the main theme for this conference and embedded developer work. So we had over 800 people showing up in person. And then I'm still trying to figure out the stats for how many were showing up virtually, but we had a fairly good virtual presence as well. And what it was, was I'm trying to bring these communities together to talk about common problems because both Ziffer and the Linux kernel use the device tree and the K config. And so some of that infrastructure is common between Linux and between Ziffer and getting it so that the developers can meet and talk will hopefully move things forward faster. Like I say, it was a very active event and we had pretty full hallways. Like I say, we effectively sold out. We only had a capacity for 800. I think we had 830 people registered. So it was exciting to see all those embedded folk together and getting together and just sort of talking about common problems. It made some people take another look at Ziffer, which was one of my goals. And so there was a lot of interest in that. And we had our kites finally. We had our kites, but this is something that we've wanted to see since the start of the project. We actually had kites made up and available that have Ziffer on it. And those were very popular with the attendees. So you saw a lot of people walking around with the kites sticking out of their backpack. Can you talk about what are some of the highlights? And also as I asked, what were some of the themes that you kept hearing when you're talking to, I mean, of course, as you said, the focus was more on developers. What is more, they all know about Ziffer. They are using it Ziffer and they were talking about the production level problem or you think that it was more focused on, hey, why is it, how we can use it in kind of social media Linux? What kind of discussions were there? It has shifted from the, what is it to how to use it. It really had done that shift that we were looking for. We found about, I guess what, three new products while we were there. People came and told us about three more products. And they're now up on our product page. So Vestis, wind turbines are public now using Ziffer. So these huge wind turbines from Vestis, they've got Ziffer inside. The other ones is Seed. Seed was there as a sponsor. And so they've got a couple of new devices that they are running Ziffer and we've got them up on the page as well. And so you're starting to see that, like I say, we just recently got Arduino in as a member for the project. And so they've got a large ecosystem and they're starting to use Ziffer extensively. And we've also, we're seeing like analog devices just joined our board for the project. And so they're moving strategically in the direction of Ziffer. So there was a lot of people talking there and we were seeing more and more products showing up with Ziffer, which is exciting. Cause you know, I like to have a new product each time I talk to you. And this time there was no shortage of that. The one I'm most excited about is the wind turbine. But we've also got like the WIO terminal from Seed and then the SENSCAP S210 Sensor Builder is sitting there from Seed as well. Both of those are running Ziffer today. And so, you know, we also had like the track solar which we learned about at Embedded World. They've got, we've got that one up now on our site. So as we get more and more of these products it's just fun to watch them go. But the wind turbine ones we've sort of known about behind the scenes for a long time, a couple years now and it's nice to finally be able to be visible about it. There's a few more out there that we know about and we're waiting for, you know, the appropriate marketing people at these companies to sign off on things being visible. Google was very present there and was showing us four of the Chromebooks that are out there as part of their keynote that are using Ziffer already in their firmware for the EC units. And then we also, one of the inspiring talks from my perspective was the one from Ernest and how they're using Ziffer as an implantable in rhino horns for tracking poachers. And helping with wildlife conservation. And since I like to take photography and I kind of take pictures of wildlife and that's my hobby, that we're doing things to help preserve the rhinos and stop them from getting quite so endangered and catching the poachers is a good thing in my mind. But we still see Ziffer a lot in the trackers. Yeah, we see it a lot in the trackers and all the, you know, there's more and more type of tracking applications showing up. One of the ones is tracking your cat and tracking your dog as they wander through the neighborhood with a little cat, little dog. We learned about that one from Europe and they let us post about their product. And so there's, you know, I don't know if you've got any pets or not, but if you do and the pets go outside, being able to put these sort of trackers on and understand where they might be in the neighborhood is probably a good thing. So she who has walked around her neighborhood a few times looking for her dog that bolted out of a car when he was being scared or something like that. So having to start to, you know, use the tracking technology in the home for like your pets is kind of a cool evolution too. Do you see that Ziffer is also finding its way in the consumer space because Adafruit is there. Of course, she is there. So many other companies are there. Or you feel that it's still specific to some of the industrial use cases? It actually is making, it's been sort of in the consumer space for a bit. And like I said, that little dog, little cat tracker, that's definitely a consumer product. The hearing aids are consumer products and we've had them visible for quite a while now from OdeCon. So all their hearing aids are coming out with Ziffer inside. We're seeing, there's a couple more that I know about. They're very much consumer hardware, like, you know, hardware store products, but we don't have permissions yet to talk about them. So I'm hoping that they'll become more visible in the days to come. But yeah, any time, any place you need power to be conserved and your resource constraints, Ziffer is a pretty good solution. You know, that Rhino implant is there for two years. Okay, it's kind of how long they're trying to have the battery life lasting for. And they don't. So these are the sort of, it's those long battery life scenarios where Ziffer is really adding advantage right now. And as you mentioned earlier in a lot of devices, but if I'm not wrong, or do we know as well as Technology Innovation Institute, they have also joined the project. Talk a bit about, once again, what is driving this adoption as side-off? What's driving adoption I think is at this point in time is a factor of the functionality in that you have everything there already pre-integrated. And so you're not trying to bolt things together randomly ad hoc on your own. You have a set of a fairly complete stack sitting there already pre-integrated and you can build from. You also have a very wide community now. We've got over 1,800 contributors into the repo. We are adding on average about a third of our each releases contributors now are coming in and they are new. We're sort of sitting at about two commits an hour. And there's about 250 people a month participating on the repo. And so kernels nine commits an hour. Zephyr's two commits an hour. We're now, I guess, one of the sixth most active projects at the Linux Foundation actually, which is for an embedded project is pretty cool. When you attend this event, what kind of progress, what kind of curve you're seeing for the project? Let's just talk about in this year where you see, hey, this is where we're heading. I can say it's one year up into the right pretty much on our, in terms of the commits, in terms of the contributors, I think like say we're over 1,800 now into the repo. I'm sure the number is at stale because I haven't looked at it for two weeks courtesy of the event. But people are bringing in, they've got a lot there and they just need that extra little bit that they wanna put in for their own specific needs. And Zephyr's suing that fairly well for them. And we've just finished coming out with the latest release, the 3.4 release. There was a lot of new technologies in there, make and provide a link to our blog post that goes through some highlights of it all and goes through more details almost there. But we're, let's say we see new technology showing up pretty much every week, every other week. And then when the releases are coming out, being having to have this all integrated, tested and well-formed is important. Right now we're lining up for the next LTS and we'll be having the next LTS next year. And in parallel, we're very active on the safety from any side, trying to get everything ready to go after some safety certifications with that LTS when it comes out. So these things are all moving forward. And getting more people engaged, to care about this is something I'd say watch this space. You may hear another couple more of our members in the next few months. First of all, you wear so many hats at the foundation. Of course, we talk about SPDX and S-Bombs and all those things. And we have also talked about ZIFR Security in past as well. Talk a bit about, was there any focus on security or were there any sessions which focused on security or when you're talking with developers, the topic of security was coming up within a while? Security continues to be a primary focus for Zephyr and its ability to generate out software build materials was one of the topics of discussions in the hall, certainly, at the conference, as well as at the Zen Summit actually. So the fact that we can have that S-Bombs generated automatically out of Zephyr with just changing one line, one command line change and you suddenly have these S-Bombs is making Zephyr very interesting to certain people that are trying to work with the federal government and like things like the FDA, because the FDA is not gonna be looking at products. They're gonna refuse to consider type of products if they don't have S-Bombs as of October. And so medical devices and things in that space are sort of taking the lead on trying to make sure that this type of information is available. But Zephyr itself is actually looking at going after some of the safety certifications that are out there. And so there's work going on in the working group talking about this and we had a joint session with Flavio and David at the Deferred Developer Summit at EOS, embedded open source summit, talking about the directions for the safety teams. And so one of the things that would be, one of the things that the project does offer is if you do have a product out there today and you wanna get access to the vulnerabilities under embargo, you know, feel free, it's free to sign up. If you've got a product in the field and you can point us to it and you can say that's running Zephyr, we will certainly be willing to add you onto that list and make that available, because we wanna make sure that we do have responsible disclosure and interaction with the community effectively. We're also sort of looking at seeing if we can get another audit done for the project. We had one a few years ago and sort of we're investigating seeing if we can find, get basically enough funds secured so that we can go after another audit because they're not cheap and just basically make sure that nothing has shifted too badly or, you know, there's no surprises working for us, but we see about like maybe one or two vulnerabilities, but maybe like, you know, every other month or so. So we're not seeing a lot of rape of it coming in on the other hand, having a deep dive on some of the newer stuff that's come into the code is definitely some of the project, the security teams of the project you're interested in. Okay, thank you so much for taking time out today and give us an update, of course, on the event and the growth of the project. It's really good to see how it's growing. So thanks for that. And I'm pretty sure that we'll be talking soon, as you said, there are some new, which you cannot talk about yet. So I look forward to our next discussion. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much, appreciate it. Good to talk to you again.