Arduino Zephyr - from 50 thousand feet - How do you envision it working?

[KurtE]

@facchinm @pillo79 @mjs513 and all

Sorry, it may be just me, but I still don't understand Arduino’s goals, on what a released version of the Arduino boards on Zephyr
will look like.

It might really help if there was a writeup somewhere maybe part of the wiki that might explain the goals and a
general idea of what releases might look like. I know bits and pieces of this have been talked about in several different places but it would be great to have some top-level understanding.

My guess is a lot of this is still in flux and may take several iterations of alpha/beta releases before things fully solidify. But I still think it would be helpful to at least get a general idea of what your current thought are.

On general goals, things like:
a) How compatible should the Zephyr versions be to the current releases (MBed, Renesas, etc.) to the MBED. Things like Pin name/numbers, devices (Wire, SPI, SerialX, etc)

b) How much will the typical users need to know about Zephyr? Device Trees? On the same line, will a high percentage of users need to install from sources: ArduinoCore-zephyr, Zephyr, and all the parts it pulls in? Will this be necessary in order to configure and use the different devices and the like that are part of Zephyr? Like How would I use an OV7675 camera on the GIGA?

c) Do you believe that a reasonable percentage of developers will develop for the Arduino boards directly using the Zephyr setup? That is doing west build and west flash? If so, what things should we be migrating out of the ArduinoCore-zephyr cores/variants should be migrated down lower into the zephyr sources. Things like overlays?

d) How do you plan to setup for Boards alone versus boards that have a shield or carrier board. Like Giga with or without Giga Display Shield. Portenta alone or on a Carrier: Breakout, Hat, Mid, … In both cases with or without Cameras? For example, do you
expect that The GIGA Display Shield will stay as a Zephyr Shield? Likewise, for Portenta boards? An Arduino Variant for each of these configurations?

e) Will there be options for a user to define their own overlay and config files as part of an Arduino build? I would assume not, but...

f) How to use Multiple cores?

...
Thanks
Kurt