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RIOT Documentation

RIOT-2015.09 - Release Notes

View on GitHub The changelog can also be found on GitHub.

RIOT is a real-time multi-threading operating system that supports a range of devices that are typically found in the Internet of Things: devices based on 8-bit microcontrollers, 16-bit microcontrollers and light-weight 32-bit processors.

RIOT is based on the following design principles: energy-efficiency, real-time capabilities, small memory footprint, modularity, and uniform API access, independent of the underlying hardware (this API offers partial POSIX compliance).

RIOT is developed by an international open source community which is independent of specific vendors (e.g. similarly to the Linux community).

About this release:

This release introduces the GNRC network stack, a completely new, highly modularized and configurable IPv6/6LoWPAN stack. It also includes xtimer as a new timer subsystem for accurate short- and long-term timers. Moreover, peripheral drivers, board, and CPU support has been tidied up and contains about 50% less duplication in the build system.

About 580 pull requests with about 2,500 commits have been merged since the last release and 120 additional issues have been solved. 62 people contributed code in 278 days. 2578 files have been touched with ~320,000 insertions and ~134,000 deletions.

Loose notations used below:

  • means new feature/item
  • means modified feature/item
  • means removed feature/item

New features

General

  • complete codebase now compiles with -Werror on all platforms

Device support

  • vastly improved hardware abstraction, unified over all devices
  • unified most common code
  • complete refactoring of MSP430 and ARM7 code

Core

  • new timer subsystem: xtimer
  • extended atomic API by compare-and-swap, increase/decrease and set-to-one/set-to-zero functions
  • introduced a more energy-saving assert macro

Network Stack

  • RFC compliant gnrc network stack (6LoWPAN, IPv6, UDP, RPL) major refactoring
  • 6LoWPAN ND (including SLAAC)
  • example applications working out of the box (gnrc_networking for the full gnrc experience, gnrc_border_router for a 6LoWPAN border router, and default for simple link layer connectivity)
  • explicit support for border router
  • auto-init for the network stack
  • introduction of generic interfaces (netdev, netapi)
  • introduction of a protocol-independent FIB
  • introduction of a central packet buffer
  • wireshark-supported protocol ZEP to send IEEE 802.15.4 frames over UDP on non-IEEE-802.15.4 devices
  • support for SLIP and link-layers without addresses
  • new low-level driver model
  • new nativenet based directly on ethernet
  • conn: general stack-independent transport layer API
  • POSIX sockets ported for conn
  • NHDP support

Packages

  • support for microCoAP
  • CMSIS DSP

Supported platforms

Additional support for the following boards:

  • Zolertia ReMote
  • Atmel SAML21 Xplained Pro (saml21-xpro)
  • ST Nucleo L1
  • ST Nucleo F334
  • ST Nucleo F091
  • Phytec phyWAVE KW22
  • Eistec Mulle
  • Freescale Freedom FRDM-K64F
  • TI Stellaris Launchpad LM4F120
  • LimiFrog V1
  • Silabs EZR32WG

Drivers

  • various peripheral drivers (ADC, UART, timer, SPI, I²C, RTC, RTT, DAC, PWM…)
  • basic NVRAM driver (interface)

Network drivers

  • native ethernet driver
  • ENCx24J600 ethernet driver

Sensors drivers

  • ISL29125 RGB light sensor
  • PDC8544 LCD display
  • INA220 current and power monitor
  • MPU-9150 9-DOF motion sensor
  • LIS3DH accelerometer
  • TMP006 temperature sensor
  • MAG3110 magnetometer
  • MMA8652 accelerometer
  • DHT11/DHT22 temperature-humidity sensor
  • ADT7310 temperature sensor

System libraries

  • MD5
  • Fletcher’s checksum
  • Unified Cipher API and Block cipher operation modes: ECB, CBC, CTR and CCM
  • Bitfield operations
  • thread safe ringbuffer
  • vtimer compatibility layer

Build System

  • support for the FIT IoT-LAB testbed by direct integration into the Make build system
  • integrated Docker support
  • integration of llvm’s clang static analyzer
  • added target for the address sanitizer
  • indicating possible feature conflicts at compile time
  • unified OpenOCD script

Changes

Core

  • improved documentation
  • fixed several IPC message queue initializations
  • removed hwtimer

Drivers

  • optimized/remodeled GPIO interface
  • optimized/remodeled TIMER interface
  • temporarily removed CC2420 driver (awaiting last bug fixes for a rewrite)
  • re-implementation of the CC110x driver against the peripheral interface

Network Stack

  • temporarily removed and currently being refactored:
  • TCP support
  • CCN-lite
  • AODVv2

System libraries

  • new high level UART/stdio interface
  • better modularisation of POSIX wrapper modules
  • removed skipjack crypto library

Packages

  • updated CMSIS HAL to version 4.3

Other

  • clean-up of deprecated system and network libraries
  • clean-up of deprecated boards and drivers

Selected Issues Fixed since the Last Release

##21: Deal with stdin in bordermultiplex.c A completely new border router implementation is in place ##715: test_hwtimer_wait fails on native Fixed by @benoit-canet in #2870 ##861: neighbor discovery for 6LoWPAN not working GNRC implements 6LoWPAN ND in a RFC6775 compliant way ##1753: vtimer_msg test crashes after ~49’20” and ##1449: a removed vtimer might still get called back by hwtimer vtimer has been replaced by xtimer which does not have these issues ##1870: IPv6 neighbor advertisements are malformed According to Wireshark (and reference implementations) GNRC sends well-formed neighbor advertisements ##1964 and #1955: eventual problems with IoT-LAB M3 nodes in the testbed Solved by new driver versions for UART and radio ##2228: samd21 stack sizes are too small The stacksize has been adapted in #2229

Known Issues

##3075: nhdp: unnecessary microsecond precision NHDP works with timer values of microsecond precision which is not required. Changing to lower precision would save some memory. ##3086: Max. packet length for AT86RF2XX The size of the link-layer header is not dynamically calculated, but instead the maximum# size is always assumed. ##3201: Odd length packet snips cause invalid check sum If an odd length packet snip occurs in a packet and is not the last snip (in the order the packet is supposed to be, not in the list’s order) in a packet it will generate a wrong check sum. ##4048: potential racey memory leak According to the packet buffer stats, flood-pinging a multicast destination may lead to a memory leak due to a race condition. However, it seems to be a rare case and a completely filled up packet buffer was not observed.

##495: native not float safe When the FPU is used when an asynchronous context switch occurs, either the stack gets corrupted or a floating point exception occurs. ##499: native is segfaulting on heavy network usage Sending more than 100 packets per second causes a SEGFAULT in RIOT native. ##534: native debugging on osx fails Using valgrind or gdb with a nativenet target in OSX leads to “the network” being stuck (gdb) or the whole process being stuck (valgrind). ##3341 and #3824: nativenet crashes when hammered Flood-pinging a native instance from more than one host (either multiple threads on the host system or multiple other native instances), leads to a SEGFAULT.

##2724: Add support for serial number passing to CMSIS boards, document it Documentation about how to discover and set the serial number of CMSIS-DAP chips is missing

other issues

##2761: core: define default flags If a thread is created without the corresponding flag (CREATE_STACKTEST), the ps command will yield wrong numbers for the stack usage ##2927: core: Automatically select the lowest possible LPM mode Not all available low power modes (LPMs) are implemented for each platform and the concept of how the LPM is chosen need some reconsideration ##2967: Makefile.features: location is not relevant for all features Provided features for the build system should be split up into a board and cpu specific part ##3109: periph/random: random_read should return unsigned int The documentation of this function does not match corresponding implementation.

Special Thanks

We like to give our special thanks to all the companies that provided us with their hardware for porting and testing, namely the people from (in alphabetical order): Atmel, Freescale, Limifrog, Phytec, SiLabs, and Zolertia; and also companies that directly sponsored development time: Cisco Systems, Eistec, Ell-i, FreshTemp LLC, and Phytec.

More information

http://www.riot-os.org

Mailing lists

IRC

  • Join the RIOT IRC channel at: irc.freenode.net, #riot-os

License

  • Most of the code developed by the RIOT community is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) version 2.1 as published by the Free Software Foundation.
  • Some external sources are published under a separate, LGPL compatible license (e.g. some files developed by SICS).

All code files contain licensing information.