What happened to mbedOS support?

[Garrett]

I was beyond excited to see all the support Nordic was providing to the mbedOS project.

All of a sudden it disappeared.

If not supporting mbed the alternatives would be,

 * freeRTOS

 * Zephyr

However I fear these alternatives will

 * Be less accessible to new developers

 * Be less secure than the options provided by ARM (Unless Nordic plans to switch to RISC-V)

 * Restrict progress in terms of embedded development best practices

[bjorn-spockeli]

We're still a partner in the mbedOS project, but we've been concentrating our efforts on other embedded RTOSes like the Zephyr Project and FreeRTOS were we see a higher customer demand. 

Regarding your concerns, I do not think that these RTOSes will be less accessible, less secure and restrictive in terms of embedded best practices. 

Best regards

Bjørn

[Garrett]

Will your Zephyr and freeRTOS efforts be ARM Platform Security Architecture (PSA) compliant?

We have multiple nrf52840 based designs completed or in progress and would greatly prefer your efforts to be directed towards working with ARM on mbed.

[bjorn-spockeli]

I am afraid that I do not know if our Zephyr and freeRTOS efforts be ARM Platform Security Architecture (PSA) compliant or not. 

However, the nRF52840 has the ARM Cryptocell 310 that allows you to store a Device root key that is not accessible to the application and can then be used by its cryptographic accelerators. Together with the ACL peripheral you can then create a boot code section that is not accessible from the application and uses the Cryptocell and the root key to verify application code prior to passing execution to it. We do not have a Secure Boot implementation in our SDK(FreeRTOS) or in Zyphyr yet, but this is work that is in progress. 

[Garrett]

Unless I'm mistaken ARM's PSA should provide you with a more or less generic path to secure boot especially since the nRF52840 has cryptocell.

Considering this in addition to the other benefits of mbedOS and I think you'd have a pretty compelling case to restart support of mbed.

* automated test framework

* generic network interfaces for various connectivity methods (ethernet, cell, 6lowpan(2.4GHz & subgig), wifi) 

* LoRaWAN stack and radio driver integration

* generic bootloader

* generic APIs for all common mcu peripherals

* C++

* generic APIs for securing secrets/root of trust

Many more I'm not listing.

Really bummed overall, but glad to see ARM has at least continued support of NRF52 in Nordic's absence.

[bjorn-spockeli]

Thanks for the constructive feedback. I will pass this on to our Product Management team.