RTEMS 6.2 Released

The RTEMS Project is proud to announce the availability of the 6.2 release of RTEMS. It is available from https://ftp.rtems.org/pub/rtems/releases/6/6.2/ which includes formatted documentation, all source code, and generated Doxygen. The core developers are quite proud of this release with many features added or improved. The build system has been changed from GNU autoconf/automake to the Python based Waf which has resulted in much faster build times. The main RTEMS source repository no longer contains a network stack with the user having a choice of LibBSD, lwIP, or the legacy stack. Another important change is that a significant portion of the code has been relicensed to the 2-Clause BSD License. If you have submitted source code in the past to the RTEMS Project and not given permission via issue 3053, we would appreciate you doing so. See the release notes for more details.

An important update is that libbsd is now available that is based on FreeBSD 14. We continue to provide but have obsoleted rtems-libbsd-6.2.tar.xz which was based on FreeBSD 12. We recommend all users move to rtems-libbsd-fb14-6.2.tar.xz. Note that both files were not listed in the release notes but are present.

There is another important and almost invisible change to the RTEMS ecosystem which should help many users. The RTEMS Source Builder now uses a cache of files within the RTEMS.org infrastructure. This helpes users in organizations with restrictions on where they can download from since now all files and patches needed to build tools can come from one site. This also avoids being rate limited by tool download site which are battling AI bots. If you have had problems like these when using the RTEMS Source Builder and this addresses it, please let us know. If there are still issues like these, also please let us know. If you cannot download the sources and patches for the tools, that is a serious RTEMS usability issue.

We hope the user community enjoys this release as we think they will.