Xiaomi Vela Open‑Source IoT Operating System: Features, Architecture, and Ecosystem

At the 19th Open Source China "Open Source World" conference, Xiaomi Vela’s open‑source lead Du Chao delivered a keynote titled “Xiaomi Vela Open‑Source: Co‑building a Prosperous IoT OS Ecosystem,” describing the platform’s evolution, technical strengths, and ecosystem partnership plans.

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

The name “Vela” derives from the Latin word for “sail” and also refers to the Sailboat constellation in the southern sky.

According to Du Chao, Vela is already installed on more than 47 million devices, covering over 1,000 SKUs in smart home, wearables, and related fields over the past three years.

Future plans include deep integration with Android and Linux to improve user experience on smart watches and smartphones, and expansion into automotive, robotics, and smart manufacturing IoT use cases.

Xiaomi will also open more than 10 million lines of Vela source code, which has passed compliance review and been optimized for an out‑of‑the‑box experience. The main repository will be hosted on GitHub with a mirror on Gitee, and an official Xiaomi Vela account will be created on B‑Station.

In November of the previous year, Xiaomi announced that Vela would be open‑sourced under the Apache 2.0 license for global hardware and software developers.

Xiaomi Vela Main Features

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

Rich components: includes networking, audio, video, graphics, security, and more, enabling rapid application development.

Easy‑to‑use framework: supports Lua, JavaScript, and provides extensive APIs and documentation.

Universal connectivity: supports Wi‑Fi, BLE, Zigbee, MQTT, etc., and integrates Xiaomi’s “MiaoXiang” technology for seamless device interaction.

Xiaomi Vela System Architecture

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

Application framework: divided into a generic lower layer for system services and a customizable upper layer for specific IoT applications (e.g., multimedia, sensor frameworks) with Cloud SDK for easy integration with Xiaomi Cloud services.

Developer tools: includes logger, debugger, and an emulator that lets developers use PC‑based debugging tools to simplify embedded development and testing.

For more details, visit https://iot.mi.com/vela/detail.html .