OSS + ELC EU 2026

When an embedded system crashes in the field, recovering the coredump often determines whether debugging takes hours or weeks. Zephyr has long supported coredumps over UART, but in modern industrial, IoT, and edge deployments the serial port is rarely accessible. Devices may be sealed in cabinets, deployed remotely, or connected only via network.

This talk introduces a new Zephyr coredump backend that streams crash data over UDP (IPv4/IPv6) at the moment of a fatal exception—no USB cable or physical access required. We will explore the design challenges of networking in the fatal path, including safely re-enabling interrupts so the NIC can transmit, and the ZCDU framing protocol used to packetize and reliably reassemble dumps from UDP datagrams. We also show how the host receiver integrates seamlessly with the existing Zephyr GDB workflow, making the switch from UART to Ethernet a simple Kconfig option. Attendees will learn how to enable fleet-scale crash capture and dramatically reduce time-to-root-cause for deployed Zephyr devices.

pull request : https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/zephyr/pull/108410