The ARM mbed OS has entered beta and a number of components have been or will be open sourced in the following weeks.
mbed is ARM’s solution for the Internet of Things, having as the foundational block mbed OS, a small kernel running on IoT devices based on Cortex-M microcontrollers. mbed OS uses a single thread event-based architecture including an event scheduler for system and user events. This solution was chosen for its simplicity and low power consumption making it a viable operating system for very small devices starting with 8KB of RAM. But ARM intends to support multithreading in 2016 after solving several security and power management issues.
mbed devices can be reached using IPv6 or 6LoWPAN over Ethernet, WiFi, or Bluetooth LE networks. mbed OS’ security is built in with uVisor while externally it uses TLS or DTLS for encrypting communications with other devices or servers. Such devices are managed with LWM2M or CoAP.
Part of the mbed ecosystem are:
- mbed Device Server – this is a core component of the platform enabling web applications to securely reach and manage mbed devices
- mbed Device Connector – a hosted version of the Device Server, providing an online service for developers to develop and test their applications
- mbed Client – a C++ library for connecting to a Device Server or Connector from outside
- mbed TLS – a cryptographic library
The code that was open sourced can be found at ARMmbed on GitHub. According to ARM, mbed has a community of 130,000 developers and various partners from silicon manufacturers to cloud services providers.