mbed os Internet of Things OS

Arm will launch a new operating system called the Mbed OS: It aims to bridge the differences between the various computing chips, helping high-level applicationssensorand other devices to interact-no matter what chips they useAtmel, Marvell,ST,Freescale,NXPor other similar manufacturers.

The software will be officially disclosed at the ARM Techcon 2014 conference held in California State Santa Clara local time this Wednesday morning, but the product has not yet been marketed. Although we can not see the truth of the moment, but we have mastered the following relevant information.

It basically consists of two parts: from the bottom-up point of view, the mbed operating system core runs on the system chip of a small sensor device: The operating system also provides drivers to interact with peripheral hardware and communicate with the external environment. Programmers can write software and run it directly on top of the kernel, and this part of the code will be responsible for controlling how the device works.

As for the other half of the stack, ARM brings us a server-side software solution called mbed Device server that can run on many large x86 or arm computing devices. The software can be compared with various high-level applications, such as the network backend and individual IoT devices; It also allows users to intelligently manage a variety of software, while excluding some of the less visible parts from the management object.

All types of Internet connection gateways-either smart phones, tablet devices or sensor devices in bowl Valonia-can communicate with them via short-range communication devices such as Wi-Fi or bluetooth , and then route the information to mbed device At the server. The server can be run in a cloud environment, or it can be owned by a local device. If conditions permit, the access device can bypass the gateway phase and directly connect to the server. In summary, this is a very flexible architecture.

The main component of this stack, especially from the bottom, stems from the mbed community that arm has been advancing since 2009: it brings together a vast pool of resources and tools designed to build arm microcontroller with C and C + +. According to our situation, more than 70,000 programmers have joined the mbed.org community website and are contributing their strength to thousands of projects-more than 30 prototypes and development projects supported by the Mbed code today.

As it stands, Arm begins to bring all the elements together and integrate them so that high-level application developers can more easily provide prototyping solutions for ARM-based sensors and functional components-a well-established foundation for a fledgling architecture platform.

ARM's plan is to leverage open standards, such as HTTP and Mqtt on top of DTLS, to deliver data in a secure manner for communication processes between devices and even for software planning scenarios. The software supports Bluetooth Smart; 2G,3G,LTE and CDMA mobile networks; Google thread; Wi-Fi and 6LoWPAN. As far as we know, ARM does not use open source libraries in its TLS encryption mechanism.

This stack also hides a variety of features such as device availability: for example, high-level server-side software can issue commands to obtain data from a sensor device in a power-saving sleep mode, which is delivered after the corresponding device is awakened and delivered to a high-level application. This simplifies the top-level architecture of the stack, effectively helping developers to write code faster and publish results to users.

The message may be frustrating for those of you who are passionate about using assembler language to work with microcontroller programming, but the core of mbed is to keep the system's chip equipment as confusing and chaotic as possible away from the developer's perspective-leaving behind a cleaner, more generic processing interface.

"The popularity of all kinds of compiling tools has been pretty good," said Arm's CTO and co-founder Mike Muller.

"We don't have to use assembly language as much as we did in the 80 's; Today, we can take a more efficient approach, and in the development process, the time factor is really very important. ”

Deep analysis

The new mbed operating system is designed specifically for the Cortex-M Chip family, which is arm's 32-bit microcontroller core family. The price of such chips is only five to 10 dollars per block, performance from low to high in turn, M0, M4 and M7 and other options for users. This mbed operating system is not used as a L4 micro core running on the iPhone 6 arm crypto coprocessor, a variety of car dashboards used by QNX or the ubiquitous arm gnu/linux, and the uclinux kind of ported kernel.

According to our situation, this new operating system uses ARM code, plus the drivers and source code provided by the hardware manufacturer and the mbed community. With everyone on the single-chip microcomputer operating system has the same knowledge, mbed operating system is very small, fully can be achieved through the CORTEX-M system chip to achieve operational results. A typical package of M0 or more of the flash storage capacity is usually between 8KB and 128KB, while memory is up to 16KB, and its clock rate is up to 48MHz; The common or enhanced version of the M4 system chip has a clock rate of up to 180MHz and includes 32KB to 2MB flash memory and up to 256KB SRAM. We can chop, the mbed operating system is designed to fully match the level of flash capacity provided by the target device.

The operating system is event-driven rather than a typical real-time scenario, Zach Shelby, head of the arm's IoT technology marketing affairs, tells us. In other words, this is not a complex set of processor based on the time period to split the first-occupied multi-tasking core; There is no background state switch or timer cutoff mechanism. Instead, the mbed operating system will always be dormant until it wakes from a sensor or other peripheral device, when it starts to work and processes the event, decides whether to trigger the upper stack component, and eventually goes into hibernation again after the event completes.

If you have ever had a microcontroller-level development work, then this mechanism is not surprising to you. For such resource-constrained environments, this approach is meaningful-that is, it can be a good way to reduce energy consumption. "Battery life is not guided by Moore's law," Shelby points out, reminding us that today's mobile processors are still severely constrained by weak power supply capabilities.

mbed operating system for ARM provides hierarchical schematic; Basically, as a developer, all you need to focus on is the top blue block, which is the application and library. The remainder forms the mbed Device Server, which abstracts the underlying software from the interaction mechanisms of iOS and Android applications or other services.

To summarize the design ideas, arm is hoping that programmers who develop applications for smartphones, tablets, and desktops using C + +, JavaScript, HTML, Swift, and other programming languages can hide all hardware-related aspects in the mbed stack, and help them to do their jobs easily. These programmers do not need to know the unlisted register and control code, and do not have to master the system of the whole domain of the preemptive mechanism; The work is mbed in an abstract way, and these fragmented but complex puzzles should not be a hindrance to application developers.

But what is all this for? This problem points to the core. In fact, if the embedded engineers were directly required to produce a sample sensing device for the Internet of things and a well-behaved companion application, the conversation would be in a brief but extremely awkward silence. The reality is that we are still in the "start-up phase" of building the Internet of things and believing that the internet of things will eventually become reality.

ARM is working with IBM to build smart city projects. This means that street lights in the city can detect how many pedestrians are nearby via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, and use a system running mbed Device server to determine the specific lighting effect. This kind of mechanism can exert the function of motion detector more accurately and more carefully.

The home environment is also the focus of the Internet of things, where users can install motion sensors on cabinet doors to help parents understand whether their baby has secretly run to the dessert-in this case, the parent can choose to use their own smartphone to receive reminders, It can also be directly connected to the children's tablet device. In other words, children who eat cookies cannot play games on their own tablets. Why don't you just lock the cupboard? Well, maybe sometimes the kids do a good job, so the parents have more flexibility to control and, when appropriate, treat sweets as rewards.

Perhaps you would prefer to control the oven in your home by simply using your smartphone. ARM wants more businesses to be part of this, and to make a profit by addressing the urgent needs of users to achieve product sales. Of course, this also means that arm is able to get more licensing benefits from such products.

Arm noted that they have courted a large number of companies to develop new mbed projects – from the Smart City project that IBM is building to the CORTEX-M Core development blueprint depicted by the system chip manufacturer, and to design the surrounding product as a center. These manufacturers want to be able to support the mbed operating system from chip to motherboard in a full range.

According to our information, the mbed operating system should be delivered to arm's partners in the fourth quarter of 2014; However, before 2015 there should not be any device products that use the software are officially put on the market. Mike Muller thinks the entire development process will take about three years, and then the supplier can really come up with the ideal mbed IoT product--assuming, of course, that the platform is widely recognised. mbed Device Server is now clearly ready to enter the production process.

The software is described as a free and partially open source solution, but ... Well, things always seem to be there, but. As far as we know, the mbed operating system is free to use, and a large part of it will eventually open up. However, there is still a binary mechanism in the firmware, and part of it will be provided to the chip manufacturer's system chip products in the form of tightly protected closed source drivers; This is partly due to the need for security, and partly because some code needs to be completely completed before it can be presented in an open source manner.

For example, you should be able to update the microcontroller firmware that is in operation, so we definitely want to encrypt the upgrade process so that the attacker can avoid uploading arbitrary malicious code to the device. In other words, the flash will contain a public key.

Of course, some people call this mechanism control, but arm itself describes it as consistency. You can tweak and refine the open source portion of the mbed stack, but arm wants to preserve the ability to maintain consistency for specific components, enabling full compatibility of the entire platform-especially in the hardware layer of security and radio broadcasts, which are fully code-supported for specific devices.

When the mbed operating system starts, the corresponding device will be able to obtain and install the most suitable firmware scheme for the peripheral mechanism; In order to achieve this goal, the system chip needs to be initialized and run its trusted command in a safe state; If the device itself has been compromised, then the ideal security update mechanism will be a dummy.

Again, binary components will still play an important role in the system. But ARM's partners will be allowed access to this part of the source code.

Based on the information we get, the security of this platform runs through the entire system, rather than adding it later or as an additional feature. The kernel is designed to take into account the "encryption box" mechanism in which the chip software runs-a sandbox-like scheme designed to prevent code from destroying the security of the device. The Cortex-m family does not provide features such as memory management units or Trustzone, so the security mechanism must be implemented in a software manner.

Before more savvy technicians started to run arbitrary code with this $5 sensor system chip through jailbreak, ARM was still able to take advantage of the binary parts of the stack to keep the firmware tightly controlled, preventing the project from falling into a fragmented abyss and directing the team to always focus on a single platform.

"Open-source mechanisms can greatly simplify platform improvements and make it easier for people to find and fix vulnerabilities," Shelby, an arm company, added.

At the same time, mbed Device server is available for free and used as a development platform, but we must first obtain permission to use it for commercial purposes. This, after all, is arm, licensing technology is the main way to gain revenue.

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As the world's largest IP provider, arm is far ahead of its competitors, with revenues of more than twice times the size of its rival market, and has recently realised that it has to dig into the new IoT market, especially since ARM's main product line is the processor IP family, and the MCU or CPU is definitely living in Smarcot's "smart "Part of the base position. In fact, ARM allows its customers to freely develop any chip for the Internet of things applications (as long as they pay licensing fees and royalties). But now, ARM's marketers have done a lot of serious work, defining the IoT market from their perspective and proposing solutions for IoT applications based on the arm cortex-m processor family.

This is the construction of a new kind of ecosystem, obviously arm deep Kong deaf this way, even can say, it is arm company in the semiconductor industry to introduce the concept of ecosystem! The establishment of an ecosystem requires the participation of multiple partners, and arm defines three categories of partners: the Cloud (providing services), partners (providing development tools), and silicon partners that provide technology. These three groups of members form the mbed partner ecosystem (in fact, mbed is an operating system developed by ARM to support IoT applications).

In the above plan, a more interesting phenomenon is that you do not see any IC or any CPU and MPU IP, but it is easy to guess, on the right side of the figure "IoT devices" will find these IP figure, such as in the following smart home solution.

The various appliance applications and control devices in the figure are developed around arm Cortex m while running the mbed OS Smart Device (SMARCOT), which can be connected to the Internet via a gateway (the gateway integrates Cortex a CPU and runs Linux). In fact, the mbed OS allows low-power wireless devices that support IPV4 or IPv6 to easily integrate with home/mobile gateways and electronic meters to provide Internet routing. A new standard in the field of home automation is thread-the IPV6-based standard makes IP addresses virtually borderless, with low power consumption and support for mesh networks between home appliances. It runs on low power Radio (802.15.4) Macs and PHY.

If you are interested in smart cities, the mbed OS can also be used to support large-scale, secure IoT streets.

Similar to a Web server that can accept connections from a phone or web browser, the device server can also handle connections from the Internet of Things (IoT) devices (or "small data"). The device server is a key catalyst for cloud service providers, operators, and enterprises to deploy and access the IoT expansion market, and it can bring end-node devices into the world of Web services. The device server can connect small data nodes in the IoT world to big data scenarios.

ARM has designed a specific strategy for the following mbed OS partners:
Make technical contribution to mbed platform;
Use mbed OS for development in your own solution;
Work with arm to develop marketing.

They will also benefit from the ecosystem. Technical advantages include the ability to gain access to platform resources before arm exposes the platform, code porting and programmatic integration, and support from the mbed design team. Partners can also get a development license for the latest version of the device server. Marketing benefits include the presence of mbed developer sites and social media channels, participation in news releases, videos, and some of the activities of ARM mbed.

ARM claims that the developer community already has more than 70,000 members, and if you bother to look at the partner's logo, you can see that almost all the big names in the MPU domain, such as Atmel, Freescale, NXP, Renesas and STMicroelectronics, are partners in the mbed OS. As well as big data service providers such as Alcatel-Lucent, IBM and Ericsson, the positive implication of this system is that it can help build and vigorously develop a new industry for the internet of things. Arm is very good at building ecosystems, and ecosystems that help drive closer relationships between new and non-traditional customers and partners.

mbed os Internet of Things OS