AliOS-Things

AliOS Things is an operating system from Alibaba designed for small connected devices, the kind found in smart home products, industrial sensors, and similar Internet of Things applications. An operating system is the core software that manages a device's hardware and lets other programs run on it. Unlike the operating systems on phones or computers, IoT operating systems are built to run on tiny chips with very limited memory and processing power.

The system supports several types of processor chips, including ARM (common in embedded devices), RISC-V, MIPS, and C-Sky. It is built in layers: the lowest layer communicates directly with the hardware, above that sits a real-time kernel that manages timing and multitasking, and above that are networking stacks, security components, and a collection of ready-made modules for common tasks like over-the-air firmware updates, logging, and connecting to Alibaba's cloud platform.

Developers can write applications for AliOS Things in C, but the system also supports JavaScript and MicroPython, which is a version of the Python programming language trimmed down to run on small chips. This makes it more accessible to developers who are not embedded systems specialists. Components are configured through YAML files, which are plain-text configuration files, so you can pick and choose which parts of the system your application needs.

Alibaba's own HaaS hardware development boards are the primary supported hardware targets, with quick-start guides available for those specific devices. The project is open source under the Apache 2.0 license and hosted on both GitHub and Gitee, a Chinese code hosting platform.