RIOT-2018.07 - 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 and 16-bit microcontrollers as well as 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:

The 2018.07 release includes new features, like NimBLE (ble stack), a MQTT-SN client, SHA-1 based PRNG, an UUID implementation. The RISC-V CPU architecture support used by the hifive1 board. Effort was done on refactoring, documentation, test improvements and bug fixes.

During the last release, maintainers contributed by running the automated test suites on their boards. This gave valuable feedback on the board support state, test reliability and where to focus effort to make testing easier and more reliable.

About 380 pull requests with about 675 commits have been merged since the last release and about 27 issues have been solved. 45 people contributed with code in 93 days. Approximately 1678 files have been touched with 147122 insertions and 16060 deletions.

Notations used below:

+ means new feature/item
* means modified feature/item
- means removed feature/item

New features and changes

Community

+ Maintainers guidelines have been written and added to the repository

Documentation

+ Fix undefined doxygen groups and add a dedicated static check
+ Extend `auto_init` documentation

Core

+ core: clist_foreach() now returns break-causing node

System libraries

+ puf_sram: SRAM PUF feature to seed PRNGs cortex-m platforms
+ random: SHA-1 based PRNG
+ matstat: Integer mathematical statistics library
+ UUID: [RFC4122](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4122) Unique ID library
* analog_util: Refactor, add unit test
- cbor: Deprecation of this module, use cn-cbor or tinycbor package
  instead

Networking

+ asymcute: an asynchronous MQTT-SN client
+ gnrc_ipv6: full duplicate address detection support according to
  [RFC4862](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4862)
+ gnrc_ipv6: support to handle RDNSS option in neighbor discovery
+ netif.h: a network-stack agnostic API to network interfaces
+ lorawan: add example application of autonomous class A device
* sock_udp: allocate ephemeral port on sock creation when port is 0
* gnrc_netif: Enable RX and TX complete events after netdev initialization
* net/gcoap: Refine Observe re-registration
* net/nanocoap: Build message with coap_pkt_t

Packages

+ NimBLE: Bluetooth Low Energy stack used in mynewt
+ TLSF: re-enable original API to have different pools
+ LUA: Add an example with the shell
+ semtech-loramac: add support for link_check MAC command
* libcose: Use RIOT random_bytes instead of randombytes
* tweetnacl: Use RIOT random_bytes instead of randombytes
* hacl: Use RIOT random_bytes instead of randombytes

Boards

+ Nucleo boards use their marketing names
+ HiFive1 (RISC-V)
+ slstk3402a
+ stm32f429i-disc1
+ stm32l476-disco
+ nucleo-l496zg
+ stm32mindev
+ frdm-k22f, frdm-k64f, frdm-kw41z: Add bus configuration for onboard FXOS8700CQ sensor
* mulle: Fix mixed up RX TX pins on UART0

CPU

+ E310 (RISC-V)
* kinetis: GPIO: Enable the correct IRQn on CM0+
* kinetis: Refactor PIT timer driver implementation
* kinetis: Refactor RTT driver
* kinetis: Refactor clock initialization code
* kinetis: Refactor LPTMR timer implementation
* kinetis: Clean up SPI module power handling
* kinetis: Conditionally enable MCG

Device Drivers

+ periph_eeprom API with support for STM32 L0/L1 and AVR
+ AT commands parser
+ Fix periph_flashpage for iotlab-a8-m3/iotlab-m3/fox boards
+ IO1 Xplained extension: add support for light sensor and SD card, fix
  GPIOs initialization and SAUL support
+ tests/bench_timers: A comprehensive benchmark for periph_timer

Build System / Tooling

+ Correctly set the RIOT_VERSION on release archives
+ iotlab-m3/iotlab-a8-m3: fix boards flashing
+ Fix use of non completely initialized BASELIBS variable
+ newlib.mk: extract gcc include search directories for newlib-nano support
+ llvm: many compatibilities issues have been resolved
* testbed-support: use new iot-lab command names

Testing

+ Address some of the failing tests
+ New tests enabled by default in CI
+ Improve testing automation for release testing

Known Issues

Networking related issues

#4527: gnrc_ipv6: Multicast is not forwarded if routing node listens to the address #5016: gnrc_rpl: Rejoining RPL instance as root after reboot messes up rooting #5051: Forwarding a packet back to its link layer source should not be allowed #5230: gnrc_ipv6: multicast packes are not dispatched to the upper layers #5748: gnrc: nodes crashing with too small packet buffer #6123: gnrc: crash with (excessive) traffic in native #7474: 6lo: gnrc fragmentation expects driver to block on TX #7737: pkg: libcoap is partially broken and outdated #8086: gnrc_rpl_p2p: not compiling #8130: gcoap: can't build witth network stacks other than gnrc #8172: gnrc_netif, gnrc_uhcpc: Replacing prefix on border router results in no configured prefix #8271: app/netdev: application stops working after receiving frames with assertion or completely without error #9616: at86rf2xx: can not correctly set channel after NETOPT_STATE_RESET #9656: gnrc/netif: various problems after resetting interface a second time #9573: pkg/lwip: assert on samr21-xpro #9584: drivers/cc2420: add netopt NETOPT_MAX_PACKET_SIZE

Timer related issues

#5103: xtimer: weird behavior of tests/xtimer_drift #5338: xtimer: xtimer_now() is not ISR safe #6052: tests: xtimer_drift_gets_stuck #7114: xtimer: adds items to the wrong list if the timer overflows between _xtimer_now() and irq_disable() #7347: xtimer_usleep stuck for small values #8251: telosb: timer config wrong when running o a tmote sky #9052: misc issues with tests/trickle

Native related issues

#495: native not float safe #5796 native: tlsf: early malloc will lead to a crash #6442: cpu/native: timer interrupt issue #7206: native: race-condition in IPC

Other platforms related issues

#4512: pkg: tests: RELIC unittests fail on iotlab-m3 #4612: pkg: TLSF does not build for 16 bit platforms #4872: at86rf2xx: Simultaneous use of different transceiver types is not supported #4954: chronos: compiling with -O0 breaks #4866: periph: GPIO drivers are not thread tafe #5009: RIOT is saw-toothing in energy consumption (even when idling) #5128: some use of asm keyword might be missing volatile #5486: at86rf2xx: lost interrupts #5774: cpu: cortexm_common: context switching code breaks when compiling with LTO #5848: arduino: Race condition in sys/arduino/Makefile.include #6018: nRF52: gnrc 6lowpan ble memory leak #6437: periph/spi: Leftovers from SPI rework in #4780 #6567: periph/spi: Switching between CPOL=0,1 problems on Kinetis with software CS #6650: GPIO Port shift in cc2538 is unconsistent #6838: Issuing a reboot on ATmega328p makes the board loop-reboot #6874: SAMD21: possible CMSIS bug #7020: isr_rfcoreerrors while pinging between CC2538DKs #7667: sam0 flashpage_write issues #7846: stm32f1: I2C read functions return bogus values with unconnected devices #8028: diskio: failed assertion in send_cmd() on lpc2387 #8045: stm32/periph/uart: extra byte transmitted on first transmission #8436: Kinetis PhyNode: failed to flash binary > 256K #8444: tests/thread_priority_inversion hangup #9616: ATmega platform issues.

Other issues

#1263: sys: the TLSF implementation contains (a) read-before-write error(s) #4053: macros: RIOT_FILE_RELATIVE printing wrong file name for headers #4488: making the newlib thread-safe #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 #6120: Windows AVR Mega development makefile Error #7220: sys/fmt: Missing tests for fmt_float,fmt_lpad #7877: SPI connection can't read 16bit size register #8107: crypto/ccm: bugs in the implementation of CCM mode #9548: Many i2c bugs found with the i2c api rework but did not reach the release #9709: examples: failed assertion in dtls-echo example

Fixed Issues from the last release (2018.04)

#8112 crypto/ccm: fix input_len checking with length_encoding #8532 kinetis: timer_set_absolute randomly misses its target #8778 sys/random: random_uint32_range is only uniform if range is a power of 2 bug quality defect #9065 flashpage_write broken on iotlab-m3 #9154 cpu/lpc2387: Fixed broken SPI driver #9451 Makefile.include: fully define BASELIBS before using its value #9579 stm32_common: fix ram length for MCUs with non-contiguous ram regions #9675 tests: gnrc_netif: fix group join iteration macro

You can get the complete detail in the git history and in the release milestone Release 2018.07.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all companies (vendors) that provided us with (their) hardware for porting and testing RIOT-OS. Further thanks go to companies and institutions that directly sponsored development time. And finally, big thanks to all of you contributing in so many different ways to make RIOT worthwhile!

More information

http://www.riot-os.org

Mailing lists

• RIOT OS kernel developers list devel@riot-os.org (http://lists.riot-os.org/mailman/listinfo/devel)
• RIOT OS users list users@riot-os.org (http://lists.riot-os.org/mailman/listinfo/users)
• RIOT commits commits@riot-os.org (http://lists.riot-os.org/mailman/listinfo/commits)
• Github notifications notifications@riot-os.org (http://lists.riot-os.org/mailman/listinfo/notifications)

IRC

• Join the RIOT IRC channel at: irc.freenode.net, #riot-os

License

• 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 and packages are published under a separate license.

All code files contain licensing information.