You've heard it from colleagues, you've seen it on Reddit... Zephyr RTOS can be difficult to navigate.

Join this session for a "Zephyr Roasting Party" where we'll openly look at and discuss the most complained-about aspects of Zephyr, and try to honestly answer common questions and criticisms such as:

• "Zephyr is bloated and really has poor real-time performance compared to other RTOSes"
• "I already have a HAL from my silicon vendor, why would I need even more HW abstractions?"
• "Devicetree is so complex! How do I even understand what's going on with all these 'macrobatics'?"
• "There's lots of drivers available upstream, sure, but how do I know how mature they are?"
• "What is this west thing, and why are you asking me to learn Python?"
• "Why is my board/driver not supported?"

The goal of the talk is NOT to rhetorically question some of the "bad" parts of Zephyr, only to immediately tell you why Zephyr is in fact the best thing since sliced bread. Instead, we will honestly discuss these pain points to help you understand better some of the design decisions behind Zephyr, and why they might (or might not!) actually be worth the steep learning curve. This will also prove to be an interesting exercise that will help you understand when you might not need or want an RTOS in the first place.

Through practical demos and examples, we’ll show how tools like Devicetree, Kconfig, or West can actually make embedded development more efficient, and we'll try to make those "scary" parts of Zephyr more approachable, and give a sense of the roadmap for all the other areas of Zephyr that still need work and love.