Best IoT Operating Systems of 2024

A kernel is the core of any embedded OS. It provides crucial task scheduling and multitasking services that ensure your application code's timing requirements can be met. You also regularly update and add new features to that code. Micrium OS is much more than a kernel. It provides a variety of modules that can be used to meet your project's requirements. Micrium OS is completely free to use on Silicon Labs EFM32 or EFR32 devices. Micrium OS can be added to your projects immediately without any licensing fees.

We work with commercial and open-source partners to provide MIPS support to many popular Real Time Operating Systems (RTOS), and the new generation IoT-specific Operating Systems. We also developed the MIPS Embedded Operating System, (MEOS), with Virtualization extensions. This targets embedded applications and the IoT area. MEOS is MIPS' internal real-time operating software (RTOS). It is the only operating system that supports new architecture features and cores, as it is in-house. Version 3.1 of MEOS contains a virtualization library that extends MEOS to a hypervisor for MIPS cores that implement the MIPS Virtualization module. We will donate engineering resources or provide development hardware and tools to assist in the development of open-source real time/IoT operating system.

RIOT powers Internet of Things, just like Linux powers the Internet. RIOT is a free and open-source operating system that was developed by a community of companies, academics, and hobbyists. It is distributed around the globe. RIOT supports all low-power IoT devices and microcontroller architectures (32, 16-bits, 8-bit) as well as external devices. RIOT aims at implementing all relevant open standards supporting an Internet of Things which is connected, secure and durable. RIOT supports DTLS transport security, IEEE 802.15.4 encryption and Secure Firmware Updates. RIOT can be easily modified to meet your application needs. We support all Internet standards and network technologies. RIOT is open for new developments and is often an early adaptor of networking.

Fuchsia, a new open-source operating system developed by Google, is currently in active development. Fuchsia is being built from the kernel to meet the demands of today's connected device ecosystem. Fuchsia continues to evolve rapidly, but the core principles and values that underpin the system have remained constant throughout the entire project. Fuchsia's core architectural principles guide its design and development. They are secure, updatable and inclusive. Fuchsia's design & development is guided by a core set of architectural principles: secure, updatable and inclusive. Fuchsia is an open-source community that welcomes contributions of high quality and well-tested. Fuchsia is still in development and there are no plans to create any frameworks. Fuchsia is constantly evolving to meet the needs of consumers, manufacturers, and developers.

From simple embedded environmental sensors to advanced embedded controllers and smart watches to IoT wireless applications, there are many options. Implements configurable architecture-specific stack-overflow protection, kernel object and device driver permission tracking, and thread isolation with thread-level memory protection on x86, ARC, and ARM architectures, userspace, and memory domains. Supports combining application-specific code and a custom kernel on platforms without MMU/MPU or memory constrained devices to create a monolithic images that are loaded and executed on a system’s hardware. Both the kernel and application code are executed in a single address space.

Containers will revolutionize connected devices and balenaOS is a great way to manage them. Built to withstand harsh networking conditions and unexpected shutdowns. This minimal Linux contains only the services required to run Docker reliably from an embedded device. Yocto Linux is used to port most devices across different CPU architectures. Actively developed in the public; participation from the community is welcome. BalenaCloud is a platform that allows modern software development to be connected to hardware. We started by porting Docker from Linux to ARM chips in 2013. We quickly realized that we needed an operating system that was optimized for this use case. This OS should be minimal and suitable for running containers on embedded devices.

NuttX (real-time operating system) is a small, compact real-time operating software (RTOS). It focuses on standards compliance and a small footprint. NuttX is scalable from 8-bit to 32 bit microcontroller environments. The primary governing standards are Posix, ANSI standards. For functionality that is not available under these standards or that is not suitable for deeply embedded environments (such a fork ()).), additional standard APIs from Unix (and other common RTOS's such as VxWorks), are adopted. Apache NuttX is a project currently in Incubation at the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), which is sponsored by The Incubator. All accepted projects must be incubated until further review determines that infrastructure, communications, decision making, and decision making processes have stabilized in a way consistent with other successful ASF projects.