We introduced the bare metal profile in Mbed OS 5.12 to offer memory constrained devices a subset of Mbed OS’s rich features. This configuration of Mbed OS excludes the RTOS and several other features and gives developers a higher degree of control over their application.

In subsequent Mbed OS releases, we added a target configuration parameter to build with ARM micro C library and GCC newlib-nano. These minimal standard libraries, which are not thread safe, offer significant memory savings and are well suited to a non-RTOS environment. We also expanded our testing capability by adding Greentea support for bare metal, and then started bare metal nightly tests on selected targets.

In Mbed OS 6, we are increasing our test coverage to test all bare metal features and components. And, as part of our PR validation, we have introduced bare metal build checks for relevant targets.

As announced in a previous post, we decided to stop releasing Mbed OS 2. We believe that Mbed OS bare metal will allow Mbed OS 2 users to take advantage of Mbed OS features while meeting the memory constraints of their small microcontrollers. We are currently porting a few of the most popular Mbed OS 2 targets to bare metal, and releasing a step-by-step guide to help our silicon partners migrate their chosen targets.

Mbed OS bare metal delivers the rich features and support our customers expect for devices with different memory footprints, through a APIs consistency between releases and RTOS and non-RTOS environments.