Best IoT Operating Systems for Linux

Developed in partnership with the world’s leading chip companies over a 15-year period, and now downloaded every 170 seconds, FreeRTOS is a market-leading real-time operating system (RTOS) for microcontrollers and small microprocessors. Distributed freely under the MIT open source license, FreeRTOS includes a kernel and a growing set of IoT libraries suitable for use across all industry sectors. FreeRTOS is built with an emphasis on reliability and ease of use. With proven robustness, tiny footprint, and wide device support, the FreeRTOS kernel is trusted by world-leading companies as the de facto standard for microcontrollers and small microprocessors. With detailed pre-configured demos and Internet of Things (IoT) reference integrations, there is no need to determine how to setup a project. Quickly download, compile, and get to market faster. Our partner ecosystem provides a breadth of options including community contributions and professional support.

Arm Mbed OS is a free, open-source IoT operating system that includes all the necessary features to develop IoT products. The OS includes everything you need to develop smart, connected products on Arm Cortex-M based hardware, including machine learning capabilities, security, connectivity stacks, an RTOS kernel and drivers for sensors and I/O devices. Arm Mbed OS is designed for the Internet of Things. It is integrated with connectivity, machine learning, networking, and security stacks and is supported with software libraries, development hardware, tutorials and examples. From hardware to the cloud, Mbed OS supports more than 70 silicon, module, cloud, and OEM partners, optimizing your developer choice. By using the Mbed OS API, your application code can remain clean, portable, and simple, while taking advantage of security, communications and machine learning. The integrated solution reduces development cost, time, and risk.

Contiki-NG is an open-source, cross-platform operating system for Next-Generation IoT devices. It focuses on dependable (secure and reliable) low-power communication and standard protocols, such as IPv6/6LoWPAN, 6TiSCH, RPL, and CoAP. Contiki-NG comes with extensive documentation, tutorials, a roadmap, release cycle, and well-defined development flow for smooth integration of community contributions. Unless explicitly stated otherwise, Contiki-NG sources are distributed under the terms of the 3-clause BSD license. This license gives everyone the right to use and distribute the code, either in binary or source code format, as long as the copyright license is retained in the source code.

Torizon makes developers more productive and helps them create easy-to-maintain products. Integrated over-the-air updates and device monitoring allow you to ship earlier, patch bugs in the field, deliver new features and detect issues faster. Software containerization simplifies maintenance and provides an additional layer of robustness. Torizon is constantly validated on Toradex System on Modules (SoMs) to ensure that you can fully focus on your application, rather than the operating system. Torizon lets you develop your product in an agile and iterative fashion. The seamlessly integrated remote update features make it possible to deploy new software easily, while device monitoring gives you instant feedback about performance and potential issues.

Raspberry Pi Imager is the quick and easy way to install Raspberry Pi OS and other operating systems to a microSD card, ready to use with your Raspberry Pi. Watch our 45-second video to learn how to install an operating system using Raspberry Pi Imager. Download and install Raspberry Pi Imager to a computer with an SD card reader. Put the SD card you'll use with your Raspberry Pi into the reader and run Raspberry Pi Imager. Browse a range of operating systems provided by Raspberry Pi and by other organisations, and download them to install manually.

An Ubuntu SSO account is required to create the first user on an Ubuntu Core installation. We will walk you through the steps of flashing Ubuntu Core on a Raspberry Pi 2, 3, 4 or CM3. At the end of this process, you will have a board ready for production or testing snaps. An Ubuntu SSO account is required to create the first user on an Ubuntu Core installation. Your board is now ready to have snaps installed, it’s time to use the snap command to install your first snap. The Snap Store is where you can find the best Linux apps packaged as snaps to install on your Ubuntu device and get started with your secure IoT journey.

OpenWrt is a highly extensible GNU/Linux distribution for embedded devices (typically wireless routers). Unlike many other distributions for routers, OpenWrt is built from the ground up to be a full-featured, easily modifiable operating system for embedded devices. In practice, this means that you can have all the features you need with none of the bloat, powered by a modern Linux kernel. Instead of trying to create a single, static firmware, OpenWrt provides a fully writable filesystem with optional package management. This frees you from the restrictions of the application selection and configuration provided by the vendor and allows you to use packages to customize an embedded device to suit any application. For developers, OpenWrt provides a framework to build an application without having to create a complete firmware image and distribution around it.

Developers are much more productive on Ubuntu than handcrafted embedded Linux. Sharing a platform shares the cost. Licensing is cheaper, updates more tested and maintenance shared. Familiar and widely used Ubuntu means easy CI/CD, better tools, faster updates and better kernels. Linux is not a differentiator. Use pre-enabled boards and focus on software unique to your story. Managing a familiar environment and platform is easier and cheaper than a specialist OS. Naturally. More Linux developers choose Ubuntu, so the talent pool is deeper and broader. Tap the biggest talent pool. Ubuntu is ahead of the pack by every measure. Productivity starts with reuse. Accelerate developers with the world’s largest package selection.

Install TorizonCore in one click with the preinstalled Toradex Easy Installer. A Graphical User Interface (GUI) and Debian containers with APT Package Manager get you started in minutes. An extending selection of development tools such as the Flash Analytics tool helps to build reliable products fast. TorizonCore is open-source and built with the Yocto Project based on the Toradex Embedded Linux BSP, which enables further customization. Torizon offers full integration with Visual Studio 2019, providing a convenient way to use a Windows development PC and familiar tools while at the same time giving you the advantages of the rich Linux ecosystem. Toradex continues to support Windows Embedded Compact / WinCE, but for a developer who wishes to move to Linux, Visual Studio with Torizon is an excellent choice.

At the heart of any embedded OS is a kernel, which provides vital task scheduling and multi-tasking services to ensure that the timing requirements of your application code can be met, even as you regularly update and expand that code with new features. Micrium OS is more than a kernel, though, providing a number of additional modules to help you meet your project’s needs. Micrium OS is provided entirely free of charge for deployment on Silicon Labs EFM32 and EFR32 devices! You can begin adding Micrium’s professional-quality components to your projects today without payment of any licensing fees.

From simple embedded environmental sensors and LED wearables to sophisticated embedded controllers, smart watches, and IoT wireless applications. Implements configurable architecture-specific stack-overflow protection, kernel object and device driver permission tracking, and thread isolation with thread-level memory protection on x86, ARC, and ARM architectures, userspace, and memory domains. For platforms without MMU/MPU and memory constrained devices, supports combining application-specific code with a custom kernel to create a monolithic image that gets loaded and executed on a system’s hardware. Both the application code and kernel code execute in a single shared address space.

eLxr Pro from Wind River is a commercial enterprise-grade Linux solution designed for cloud-to-edge deployments, supporting mission-critical workloads like AI, machine learning, and computer vision. Built on the open-source eLxr distribution, eLxr Pro offers flexible, long-term support, security monitoring, and ongoing updates. It ensures compatibility with hardware accelerators and compliance with industry standards. By providing expert consultative services and performance optimizations, eLxr Pro helps businesses scale their edge computing solutions while managing costs, security, and resources effectively.