What Makes Xiaomi Vela the Next‑Gen Open‑Source IoT OS?

Xiaomi Vela Overview

At the 19th Open Source China World Conference, Xiaomi Vela’s open‑source lead Du Chao delivered a keynote titled “Xiaomi Vela Open‑Source: Co‑building a Thriving IoT OS Ecosystem,” detailing the platform’s evolution, technical advantages, and open‑source partnership program.

Xiaomi Vela is an IoT embedded software platform built by Xiaomi on the open‑source real‑time operating system NuttX. It provides a unified software service across diverse IoT hardware, offering abundant components and an easy‑to‑use framework that bridges fragmented IoT application scenarios.

The name “Vela” comes from the Latin word for sail and also denotes the Sailboat constellation in the southern sky.

According to Du Chao, Xiaomi Vela is already deployed in more than 47 million devices, covering over 1,000 SKUs in smart home and wearable categories over the past three years.

Going forward, Xiaomi plans to deepen integration with Android and Linux to enhance user experience on smart watches and smartphones, and to extend Vela to broader IoT domains such as automotive, robotics, and smart manufacturing.

More than 10 million lines of Vela source code will be open to the public, having passed compliance review and optimized for out‑of‑the‑box experience.

The open‑source repository will be hosted on GitHub, mirrored on Gitee, and an official Xiaomi Vela account will be created on B‑station.

In November last year, Xiaomi’s “Pengpai OS” announced that Xiaomi Vela is released under the Apache 2.0 License for global hardware and software developers.

Key Features

High performance: built on the NuttX kernel, offering high real‑time responsiveness, low power consumption, and low latency, suitable for resource‑constrained embedded devices.

Rich components: includes networking, audio, video, graphics, security, and other common modules, enabling developers to quickly build applications.

Easy‑to‑use framework: provides a unified application framework supporting Lua, JavaScript, and extensive APIs and documentation.

Universal connectivity: supports Wi‑Fi, BLE, Zigbee, MQTT and Xiaomi’s MiShare technology for seamless device interaction and collaboration.

System Architecture

Base NuttX kernel: provides core OS functions such as task scheduling, inter‑process communication, file system, lightweight TCP/IP stack, power management, and device drivers.

Application framework: consists of a lower generic services layer and an upper custom layer for specific IoT applications (e.g., multimedia and sensor frameworks), with a Cloud SDK that simplifies integration with Xiaomi cloud services.

Developer tools: includes a logger, debugger, and an emulator that allows developers to use rich PC‑side debugging tools, reducing the difficulty of embedded system development.

See more details at https://iot.mi.com/vela/detail.html .