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@PeterKietzmann PeterKietzmann released this 01 Feb 17:21
2017.01
158463e

RIOT-2017.01 - Release Notes

RIOT is a multi-threading operating system which enables soft real-time capabilities and comes with
support for a range of devices that are typically found in the Internet of Things: 8-bit microcontrollers,
16-bit microcontrollers and light-weight 32-bit processors.

RIOT is based on the following design principles: energy-efficiency, soft real-time capabilities,
small memory footprint, modularity, and uniform API access, independent of the underlying hardware
(with 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) and is licensed with a non-viral copyleft license (LGPLv2.1),
which allows indirect business models around the free open-source software platform provided by RIOT.

About this release:

This release provides a lot of new features, fixes and enhancements. Among others these features
contain an initial - still experimental - TCP implementation based on the GNRC network stack, support
for reading from and writing to SD cards, a new power management architecture as well additional third
party packages such as TweetNaCl, a cryptographic library, and Heatshrink a data compression library
optimized for embedded real-time systems.
We added support for new platforms including the Calliope mini, Maple mini, and a couple of STMs
Nucleo boards. Device support was extended by several new drivers, e.g., for NXP PN532 NFC, Microchip
MRF24J40 802.15.4 radio (experimental), or Bosch BME280 pressure/humidity/temperature sensor.
We completely refactored the SPI interface, allowing for internally handled hardware or software chip
select lines and shared bus usage for multiple devices with different SPI configurations.

About 278 pull requests with about 606 commits have been merged since the last release and about 84
issues have been solved. 44 people contributed with code in 87 days. 2230 files have been touched with
220275 insertions and 159840 deletions.

Notations used below:

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

New features and changes

General

  • New power management architecture

Core

  • Initial (experimental) OpenOCD/GDB thread support
  • Make Semaphore implementation IPC independent

API changes

  • SPI driver interface (rework)
  • Add Mutex lock with timeout parameter
  • Xtimer allow for arbitrary frequency & additional convenience functions
  • HDC1000 driver remodeling
  • MMA8652 driver remodeling (MMA8x5x now)

System libraries

  • Lightweight CRC16 implementation
  • Remove Twofish and RC5 implementation

Networking

  • Initial (experimental) GNRC TCP implementation
  • Provide sock-port for POSIX SOCKETS
  • Provide sock-port for GCOAP
  • Provide sock-port for UHCPC
  • Provide sock_ip wrapper for LWIP
  • Native: allow for multiple netdev2_tap devices

Packages

  • TweetNaCl: cryptographic library
  • Heatshrink: compression/decompression library
  • Removed: OpenWSN

Platforms

  • Support for Maple mini board
  • Support for ST Nucleo-32 F303 board
  • Support for ST Nucleo-32 F042 board
  • Support for Calliope mini board
  • Drop support for PTTU platform

Drivers

  • Rework SPI driver interface
  • Peripheral flashrom driver interface
  • SD Card driver (SPI)
  • NXP PN532 NFC driver
  • Initial (experimental) Microchip MRF24J40 radio driver
  • JEDEC JC42.4 temperatur sensors
  • Bosch BME280 pressure, humidity and temperature sensor
  • NXP MMA8x5x accelerometer (previously MMA8652)
  • Unified STM32 RTC driver
  • Unified STM32 UART driver
  • Unified STM32 PWM driver
  • Unified STM32 timer driver
  • Unified NRF5x low power modes
  • Low power modes for the STM32F1 family
  • Unified Kinetis low power modes
  • Xbee port to netdev2 API
  • W5100 port to netdev2 API
  • NRF5x/'nrfmin' port to netdev2 API (w/o 6LoWPAN support currently)
  • Refactor synchronous UART by new 'isrpipe' module

Build System

  • Experimental Jenkins CI
  • Python3 support for compile script (compile_test.py)

Other

  • UUID module for central ID/address generation

Fixed Issues from the last release

#4388: POSIX sockets: open socket is bound to a specific thread
#4737: cortex-m: Hard fault after a thread exits
#4874: Using single RSSI_BASE_VALUE for all Atmel radios
#5034: gnrc_networking: offers txtsnd, does not print received packets
#5083: AVR8: Reboots after return 0;
#5719: cc2538: rf driver doesn't handle large packets
#5954: nRF52 uart_write gets stuck
#6036: tinydtls: DTLS randomly missing functions
#6037: pkg/nanocoap: native build fails on macOS
#6358: arduino uno : xtimer accuracy problem

Known Issues

Networking related 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.
#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.
#5016: gnrc_rpl: Rejoining RPL instance as root after reboot messes up routing
#5230: gnrc ipv6: multicast packets are not dispatched to the upper layers
#5656: Possible Weakness with locking in the GNRC network stack: For some operations mutexes to the
network interfaces need to get unlocked in the current implementation to not get deadlocked.
Recursive mutexes as provided in #5731 might help to solve this problem.
#5748: gnrc: nodes crashing with too small packet buffer: A packet buffer of size ~512 B might lead
to crashes. The issue describes this for several hundret nodes, but agressive flooding with
just two nodes was also shown to lead to this problem.
#5858: gnrc: 6lo: potential problem with reassembly of fragments: If one frame gets lost the reassembly
state machine might get out of sync
#6123: gnrc: crash with (excessive) traffic

NDP is not working properly

#4499: handle of l2src_len in gnrc_ndp_rtr_sol_handle: Reception of a router solicitation might lead
to invalid zero-length link-layer addresses in neighbor cache.
#5005: ndp: router advertisement sent with global address: Under some circumstances a router might
send RAs with GUAs. While they are ignored on receive (as RFC-4861 specifies), RAs should have
link-local addresses and not even be send out this way.
#5122: NDP: global unicast address on non-6LBR nodes disappears after a while: Several issues
(also see #5760) lead to a global unicast address effectively being banned from the network
(disappears from neighbor cache, is not added again)
#5467: ipv6 address vanishes when ARO (wrongly) indicates DUP caused by outdated ncache at router
#5539: Border Router: packet not forwarded from ethos to interface 6
#5790: ND: Lost of Global IPV6 on node after sending lot of UDP frame from BR

Timer related issues

#4841: xtimer: timer already in the list: Under some conditions an xtimer can end up twice in the
internal list of the xtimer module
#4902: xtimer: xtimer_set: xtimer_set does not handle integer overflows well
#5338: xtimer: xtimer_now() not ISR safe for non-32-bit platforms.
#5928: xtimer: usage in board_init() crashes: some boards use the xtimer in there board_init()
function. The xtimer is however first initialized in the auto_init module which is executed
after board_init()
#6052: tests: xtimer_drift gets stuck: xtimer_drift application freezes after ~30-200 seconds
#6331: RTC alarm triggered with 1s delay
#6419: cpu/cc2538: timer broken
#6427: xtimer: infinite loop with xtimer_mutex_lock_timeout
#6502: cpu/stm32l1: RTC broken
#6542: boards/nucle-f0xx: misconfigured timer configuration (fix in #6494)

native related issues

#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.
#2175: ubjson: valgind registers "Invalid write of size 4" in unittests
#4590: pkg: building relic with clang fails.
#5796: native: tlsf: early malloc will lead to a crash: TLSF needs pools to be initialized (which is
currently expected to be done in an application). If a malloc is needed before an application's
main started (e.g. driver initialization) the node can crash, since no pool is allocated yet.
#6145: native: system reboots on SIGTRAP
#6442: cpu/native: timer interrupt does not yield thread

other platform related issues

#1891: newlib-nano: Printf formatting does not work properly for some numeric types: PRI[uxdi]64,
PRI[uxdi]8 and float are not parsed in newlib-nano
#2006: cpu/nrf51822: timer callback may be fired too early
#2143: unittests: tests-core doesn't compile for all platforms: GCC build-ins were used in the
unittests which are not available with msp430-gcc
#2300: qemu unittest fails because of a page fault
#4512: pkg: tests: RELIC unittests fail on iotlab-m3
#4560: make: clang is more pedantic than gcc oonf_api is not building with clang (partly fixed by #4593)
#4694: drivers/lm75a: does not build
#4822: kw2xrf: packet loss when packets get fragmented
#4876: at86rf2xx: Simultaneous use of different transceiver types is not supported
#4954: chronos: compiling with -O0 breaks
#4866: not all GPIO driver implementations are thread safe: Due to non-atomic operations in the drivers
some pin configurations might get lost.
#5009: RIOT is saw-toothing in energy consumption (even when idling)
#5103: xtimer: weird behavior of tests/xtimer_drift: xtimer_drift randomly jumps a few seconds on nrf52
#5361: cpu/cc26x0: timer broken
#5405: Eratic timings on iotlab-m3 with compression context activated
#5460: cpu/samd21: i2c timing with compiler optimization
#5486: at86rf2xx: lost interrupts
#5489: cpu/lpc11u34: ADC broken
#5678: at86rf2xx: failed assertion in _isr
#5799: kw2x: 15.4 duplicate transmits
#5944: msp430: ipv6_hdr unittests fail
#5848: arduino: Race condition in sys/arduino/Makefile.include
#6018: nRF52 gnrc 6lowpan ble memory leak
#6261: SAMD21 TC3 & TC4 issue when using TCC2
#6379: nrf52dk/nordic_soft_device: not working anymore
#6437: periph/spi: Leftovers from SPI rework
#6501: boards/nucleo: Pin usage collision (SPI clk vs. LED0)
#6526: atmega based boards freeze when main thread is over

other issues

#1263: TLSF implementation contains (a) read-before-write error(s).
#3256: make: Setting constants on compile time doesn't really set them everywhere
#3366: periph/i2c: handle NACK
#4488: Making the newlib thread-safe: When calling puts/printf after thread_create(), the CPU hangs
for DMA enabled uart drivers.
#4866: periph: GPIO drivers are not thread safe
#5128: make: buildtest breaks when exporting FEATURES_PROVIDED var
#5207: make: buildest fails with board dependent application Makefiles
#5561: C++11 extensions in header files
#5776: make: Predefining CFLAGS are parsed weirdly
#5863: OSX + SAMR21-xpro: shell cannot handle command inputs larger than 64 chars
#5962: Makefile: UNDEF variable is not working as documented
#6022: pkg: build order issue
#6451: Wrong value in SRF08 driver
#6519: driver/mrf24j40: broken on stm32f4discovery

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 alphabeticalorder): Atmel, Freescale, Imagination
Technologies, Nordic, OpenMote, Phytec, SiLabs, UDOO, and Zolertia; and also companies that directly
sponsored development time: Cisco Systems, Eistec, Ell-i, Enigeering Spirit, Nordic, OTAkeys 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 developedby SICS).

All code files contain licensing information.

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