New –  FreeRTOS Long Term Support to Provide Years of Feature Stability

Today, I’m particularly happy to announce FreeRTOS Long Term Support (LTS). FreeRTOS is an open source, real-time operating system for microcontrollers that makes small, low-power edge devices easy to program, deploy, secure, connect, and manage. LTS releases offer a more stable foundation than standard releases as manufacturers deploy and later update devices in the field. As we have planned, LTS is now included in the FreeRTOS kernel and a set of FreeRTOS libraries needed for embedded and IoT applications, and for securely connecting microcontroller-based (MCU) devices to the cloud.

Embedded developers at original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and MCU vendors using FreeRTOS to build long-lived applications on IoT devices now get the predictability and feature stability of an LTS release without compromising access to critical security updates. FreeRTOS 202012.00 LTS release applies to the FreeRTOS kernel and IoT libraries — FreeRTOS+TCP, coreMQTT, coreHTTP, corePKCS11, coreJSON, and AWS IoT Device Shadow.

We will provide security updates and critical bug fixes for all these libraries at least until December 31, 2022.

Benefits of FreeRTOS LTS
Embedded developers at OEMs who want to use FreeRTOS libraries for their long-lived applications want to benefit from security updates and bug fixes in the latest FreeRTOS mainline releases. Mainline releases can introduce both new features and critical fixes, which may increase time and effort for users to include only fixes.

An LTS release provides years of feature stability of included libraries. With an LTS release, any update will not change public APIs, file structure, or build processes that could require changes to your application. Security updates and critical bug fixes will be backported at least until Dec 31, 2022. LTS releases contain updates that only address critical issues including security vulnerabilities. Therefore, the integration of LTS releases is less disruptive to customers’ development and integration efforts as they approach and move into production. For MCU vendors, this means reduced effort in integrating a stable code base and faster time to market with vendors’ latest libraries.

Available Now
The FreeRTOS 202012.00 LTS release is available now to download. To learn more, visit FreeRTOS LTS and the documentation. Please send us feedback on the Github repository and the forum of FreeRTOS.

— Channy