.. SPDX-License-Identifier: CC-BY-SA-4.0 .. Copyright (C) 2024 Gedare Bloom .. _6_highlights: RTEMS 6 Highlights ================== This section describes some of the major improvements and changes in RTEMS 6. Please refer to the release notes for more detailed updates as this is not an exhaustive list of changes. Chat with RTEMS Community on Discord ------------------------------------ We have established an active community on our :r:url:`discord` that has pretty much replaced our mailing lists, although you're still more than welcome to use those too. Hop on by and say Hi! Contribute to RTEMS through GitLab ---------------------------------- We have upgraded our development infrastructure to use a self-hosted GitLab instance. This has replaced both our Trac ticket system and also our use of the :r:list:`devel` for patch submissions. Check it out at our :r:url:`devel` and maybe review some MRs, open an Issue, or send us some code! Hit us up on the :r:url:`discord` if you need any help. We have really seen a lot of engagement and faster pace of development with GitLab, and we are hopeful that it allows us to improve the pace and quality of delivering RTEMS. Flight Readiness and Pre-Qualification -------------------------------------- One of the major efforts during the version 6 development is what we call the pre-qualification of RTEMS. This effort was sponsored primarily by the European Space Agency (ESA) and included several contributors. From the RTEMS community, the primary contributors were from embedded brains GmbH & Co. KG. The outcome of this effort can be seen in both the high quality of the RTEMS 6 code and in the improved documentation. Most notably is the creation of a new RTEMS Manual for RTEMS Software Engineering to help guide RTEMS contributors and document our community processes in a way that supports flight readiness and similar rigorous safety-critical systems engineering efforts. Revamping the Network Stacks ---------------------------- A major undertaking in this release cycle is the refactoring and improving of our various network stacks. The Legacy Network stack has been pulled out of RTEMS (cpukit/libnetworking) and now resides in the rtems-net-legacy.git repository. This effort was led by Vijay Banerjee, and allows us to gracefully maintain this stack without having to carry it in rtems.git. We have also started to adopt an lwIP stack in the rtems-lwip.git repository for use with RTEMS on lightweight targets with several contributions from community members including Vijay, Pavel Pisa, and Kinsey Moore. Meanwhile, the rtems-libbsd.git repository holds the high-performance networking stack we borrow from FreeBSD. The rtems-libbsd has also undergone some major changes during this release cycle, and we are pleased to offer networking stack versions based on FreeBSD 12 and FreeBSD 14 for use with RTEMS 6. This stack has especially been improved by the work of embedded brains GmbH & Co. KG., OAR Corporation, and by a newer face in our community, Aaron Nyholm. Thank you to all who are contributing to make our networking stacks modern, performant, and secure while continuing to support users with backwards-compatibility needs. New Build System ---------------- Another big contribution early in the 6 development cycle was the introduction of a `modern build system using waf `. This build system has a lot of advantages over our previous system that used configure and make. Chief among them is the build speed! In addition to being much faster, the new system encapsulates configuration in a more flexible and programmatic way. Accomplishing all this resulted in many changes to the internal layout of the source code and header files in RTEMS. Debugging with GDB ------------------ As part of a Google Summer of Code project completed by Suraj Kumar under the guidance of Chris Johns, we now have pretty printing integrated with gdb for RTEMS. This capability is documented in :ref:`Pretty Printing and GDB `.