OSS + ELC EU 2026

A decade after its launch, Zephyr has grown from a small RTOS into a capable, MMU-aware, userspace-supporting system running on application-class cores. So people keep asking: can it replace Linux? A better question is how the two can work together - and Zephyr already has what it needs to do that.

This talk shows how Linux and Zephyr run side by side on the same SoC, using parts Zephyr ships today: the IPC service layer, OpenAMP and RPMsg for messaging between the two cores, mailbox and shared-memory backends, and the mechanisms that let Linux start and stop Zephyr firmware. Based on real work on NXP i.MX and i.MX RT platforms, I'll show how these pieces fit, and where the hard parts are - memory layout, buffer sizes, address translation, and shutdown order.

The takeaway: after ten years, the interesting frontier isn't replacement. It's connecting the two so each kernel does what it's best at on the same chip.