AliOS Things

18th March 2021 Harshvardhan Mishra

What is AliOS Things ?

AliOS

(formerly YunOS and Aliyun OS) is a Linux distribution developed by Alibaba Cloud, a subsidiary of Chinese company Alibaba Group. It is designed for smart cars and Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and it has been used as a mobile operating system.

AliOS Things is Alibaba’s IoT version of AliOS Family, it was announced in The Computing Conference 2017 in Hangzhou by Alibaba Cloud, and open sourced in 20^th, October, 2017 at github: https://github.com/alibaba/AliOS-Things.

AliOS Things targets to build the turnkey solution for IoT infrastructure, with the key abilities of performance, simplicity, security, cloud integration, rich components and so on. Further more, it natively supports the connection between devices and Aliyun Link, therefore can be widely applied in smart home, smart city, next-generation travel, etc.

Architecture Overview

AliOS Things supports multiple architectures, including ARM, C-Sky, MIPS, rl78, rx600 and xtensa, AliOS Things also supports a large number of boards.

From an architectural point of view, AliOS Things adapts Layered Architecture and Component Architecture. From bottom to top, AliOS Things includes:

BSP: Board Support Package mainly developed and maintained by SoC Vendor
HAL: Hardware Abstraction Layer, like WiFi, UART
Kernel: Rhino RTOS Kernel, Yloop, VFS, KV Storage included
Protocol Stack: LwIP TCPIP Stack, uMesh mesh networking stack included
Security: TLS, TFS(Trusted Framework Service), TEE(Trusted Exexcution Environment)
AOS API: AliOS Things exposed APIs for Application and Middleware
Middleware: Alibaba’s value-added and commonly seen IoT components included
Examples: hands-on sample codes, and well tested applications such as Alinkapp

All modules have been organized as Components, and each component has its own .mk file to describe its dependency with other Components, which enables applications to choose components needed easily.

Microchip collaboration

You can Build smart and secure cloud-connected embedded designs for the Internet of Things (IoT) using Microchip’s solutions with AliOS Things. In collaboration with AliOS, You can get all the components, tools, software and support you need to rapidly develop your project. FOr more information https://www.microchip.com/design-centers/internet-of-things/alios

For more Details Visit https://aliosthings.io/#/?id=alios-things