The Azure Sphere 20.10 OS is scheduled for release to Retail Evaluation in mid-October. For this release, we are making important changes to the Retail Evaluation period:
- The Retail Evaluation period will last three weeks instead of the usual 14 days.
- We will provide a special evaluation version of the SDK for use during this period. This SDK will be replaced by the final version of the 20.10 SDK when the OS is released to the retail feed.
- We ask you not only to validate your current application binaries (built with the 20.07 or earlier SDK) but also to rebuild your applications with the evaluation SDK and validate those binaries as well.
Why is 20.10 Retail Evaluation different?
The Azure Sphere 20.10 OS and SDK incorporate some fundamental changes that may affect your applications. For 20.10, we upgraded The Yocto Project to the latest 3.1 LTS Dunfell release, which includes updated tools and libraries that may result in a change to the amount of memory used by applications.
To help you verify that your applications continue to work as intended, we will provide an evaluation version of the 20.10 SDK along with the Azure Sphere OS, so that you can rebuild your applications. You might see new or different GCC warnings when you compile with the new Azure Sphere SDK.
We are providing early notification of the evaluation release and extending the overall evaluation period by a week so that you have additional time to validate your existing applications and ensure that you can rebuild and run them without issues.
What should you do?
First, set up a device group for Retail Evaluation if you haven’t already done so. Devices in this group will receive the 20.10 Retail Evaluation OS when we release it.
When we release the 20.10 OS to Retail Evaluation:
- Test your existing application binaries with the new OS to make sure that they continue to work as you expect.
- Recompile your applications using the evaluation SDK and test them with the new OS. We recommend that you test high-memory use scenarios.
- If you encounter problems or discover errors, notify Microsoft immediately.
When the Retail Evaluation OS is released, we will provide details about installation and use of the evaluation SDK, recommended testing scenarios, and how to notify us about problems. See 20.10 Retail Evaluation for more information.
