CMRX on FOSDEM 2025
In February 2025 the FOSDEM conference took place again in Brussels for 25th time. This year there were 24 developer rooms which hosted more than 1000 different talks. As CMRX reached state mature-enough to be able actually do useful work we decided to present it on largest open source conference in Europe (and probably in the whole world).
As CMRX is an embedded RTOS, there were multiple developer rooms relevant for us. This project could be interesting to attendees of Embedded, Mobile and Automotive devroom or for Microkernel and Component-Based OS devroom.
The goal of FOSDEM presence was to spread the knowledge, collect some feedback on the project and hopefully pursue several people to actually try the project. For this goal the Embedded devroom would probably be a better place as more embedded developers would be there than in Microkernel devroom.
Though we decided to apply for Microkernel devroom time as the whole concept of CMRX is rather novel and embedded industry kind-of hates innovation. For Microkernel devroom the CMRX kernel provided fresh and quite unique application of the microkernel concept. Potentially CMRX done what nobody done before - running a microkernel, memory protected on a device without memory mapping unit.
Microkernel devroom is a smaller devroom and there was quite a lot of talks, so the time allocated for our talk was short. Thus we decided to focus on presenting what problem CMRX tries to solve and what are the basic building blocks it builds upon.
The link to the talk is here.
Unfortunately the recording infrastructure of FOSDEM wasn’t able to cope with the amount of data they had to process and the video recording of my talk is not available as substantial amount of the recording was lost.
Having so many people involved in microkernels around me led to some valuable chat and input after I gave my presentation. Good thing is that the overall concept was understood and its limits are clearly known.
FOSDEM is not just about talks despite there are plenty of them. FOSDEM is also about meeting other people and chatting with them. One place where an opportunity to meet new people is are stands. There were multiple stands more- or less-closely related to embedded development yet I probably spent the most time around the Zephyr stand.
The ultimate goal of CMRX is not to replace all other operating systems and establish world dominance (muhaha). The ultimate goal is to make the embedded software more secure. So I’ve curious on how Zephyr - the newest and very good-looking contender in embedded RTOSes - takes cybersecurity. I am aware of the “user mode” feature of Zephyr so I went around Zephyr stand and asked about usage of this function. Not to much surprise the prevalent answer was (shrugs) “You know, it is complicated, nobody is using it.”
Since then things improved a bit on Zephyr side as they introduced loadable modules which can be memory isolated with much less effort than one required for user mode.
Next big event in embedded industry in Europe is the Cybersecurity Resilience Act taking effect. This will happen at the end of year 2027 which may sound like a distant future. Everyone seemed to ignore it but not me. Even before FOSDEM I’ve been networked to embedded cybersecurity evangelist and performer Marta Rybczynska who agreed to reserve time to have a talk on this topic with me. Later we got an idea to invite more people so my questions could help others as well. Thus Martha organized a BoF session on CRA in the time reserved for out chat. The demand was extreme and exceeded expectations both mine and Martha’s. The room was packed full and few people could not even get inside.
The outcome of visiting FOSDEM? Positive. Things won’t change overnight - as I said above - embedded is an extremely conservative industry. I got several people interested into project but no mass migration or conversion of vegetarians. I did not even expect that. There’s a lot of work ahead of us. See you at FOSDEM 26.