The Azure RTOS family — ThreadX, NetX Duo, USBX, FileX — moved from Microsoft to the Eclipse Foundation in 2025, and the transition is still settling. If your firmware ships NetX Duo — and the TLS running on top of it — and you’ve started asking “who backs this stack in five years?”, you’re not alone: teams are actively looking for a NetX Duo alternative. Here’s the short version of what the path to wolfIP looks like.
What’s happening with NetX Duo
- The stack is maintained under the Eclipse ThreadX project. The latest release is NetX Duo 6.5.1.202602.
- The project is active, but the contributor base is small and the roadmap is now set by project governance, not a single vendor.
- There is no published long-term support policy and no commercial support contract against the stack.
None of that means NetX Duo is broken or at end-of-life. It means the support question changed: for connectivity middleware that stays in your firmware for a decade, “community goodwill” is a hard answer to put in a risk review, in particular in times of supply-chain auditing and EU’s cyber resilience act (CRA).
Why teams look for a NetX Duo alternative
- Decade-scale lifetime. The TCP/IP stack is one of the last components you ever rewrite on your own.
- The whole family, or nothing. Azure RTOS is interlocked — ThreadX, NetX Duo, USBX, FileX, plus the CubeMX middleware integration on ST parts. Untangling one component usually means touching all of them.
- No commercial backstop. When a product fails in the field, a supplier with a support contract answers, not a mailing list.
What wolfIP offers
wolfIP (github.com/wolfSSL/wolfIP) is an embedded TCP/IP stack built around two things: zero dynamic memory allocation — every socket and buffer is sized at compile time — and a BSD-style socket API that most embedded engineers already know.
- IPv4 TCP/UDP (with modern TCP: SACK, window scaling, timestamps), ICMP, DHCP and DNS clients
- Optional IPv4 forwarding, multicast, raw and packet sockets
- Security built in: IPsec ESP, wolfGuard (WireGuard VPN), and an HTTP server with wolfSSL TLS
- In-tree Wi-Fi supplicant: WPA2-Enterprise and WPA3
- In-tree ports for STM32 (H563, H753, F4, N6, C5A3), NXP, AMD and LPC54S018, on FreeRTOS, Zephyr or bare metal
- DO-178C certification in progress; commercial license and support available
TLS: the two ecosystems in a nutshell
NetX Duo doesn’t leave TLS to third parties: it ships NetX Secure, an in-tree TLS 1.2/1.3 and DTLS layer on top of its own portable crypto library (nx_crypto — AES, EC, RSA, DH, DRBG, plus legacy MD5/DES/3DES). It’s maintained by the same small community, there’s no FIPS-validated crypto module behind it, no post-quantum suites, and legacy ciphers you’d have to audit out of a modern security review.
The wolfSSL side is one code family: wolfIP’s applications have wolfSSL TLS built in, and wolfCrypt is a FIPS 140-3 validated module with TLS 1.3, DTLS, and hybrid post-quantum. Same supplier, same support contract for the stack and the crypto. One integration, not two.
| NetX Duo + NetX Secure | wolfIP + wolfSSL | |
|---|---|---|
| TLS | Up to TLS 1.3 / DTLS 1.2 | Up to TLS 1.3 / DTLS 1.3 |
| Crypto | Own implementation In-tree portable C |
wolfCrypt FIPS 140-3 validated |
| Post-quantum crypto | No | Yes |
| Support | Eclipse community | Professional support up to 24/7 |
How the migration works
- Keep your application code if it already uses BSD-style sockets — the API surface you translate is small: connect, send, receive, close.
- Swap initialization — wolfIP’s static instance replaces NetX Duo’s memory-argument nx_ip_create; nothing to size or allocate at runtime.
- Replace the thread model with wolfIP’s main loop (poll + receive) plus socket callbacks.
- Port your NIC and verify — DHCP bring-up, TCP throughput, and reconnect behavior.
Getting started
The fastest way in is our live webinar “Porting wolfIP Anywhere”, where we walk through the port on real hardware.
If you have questions about any of the above, please contact us at facts@wolfssl.com or call us at +1 425 245 8247.
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