FreeRTOS on snickerdoodle

[Daniele Mannocchi]

Is it possible to run FreeRTOS on the ARM side of the ZYNQ? Which are the performances?

[Nick Burkitt]

Sure. In fact, Xilinx has a FreeRTOS BSP as part of one of their PetaLinux demos. The demo is targeted at Xilinx's own development board, but it can work on the snickerdoodle as well.

Of course, FreeRTOS is not a multi-processor OS. There's no symmetric multi-processing (SMP) capability. Your choices are to run the two ARM cores in an asymmetric multi-processing (AMP) configuration, with an independent OS on each core. You could have each run a copy of FreeRTOS, or run FreeRTOS on one core and something else (such as Linux) on the other. Or just leave the second core disabled, which will reduce power consumption.

I don't understand your question about performance. FreeRTOS is pretty lightweight and efficient, if that's what you mean. Other than that, performance is entirely a product of what you're doing and how you're doing it.

-Nick

[Daniele Mannocchi]

Thank you for the answer :) .

P.S.:AMP configuration is a very interesting opportunity!!!

[Nick Burkitt]

You're welcome. Yes, AMP is very interesting. We almost went that direction with our current project, but ended up using SMP Linux. You might want to check out this blog: http://www.rtosamp.com/.

-Nick

[Cousins]

We actually have OpenAMP running on snickerdoodle already (w/ FreeRTOS + Ubuntu/ROS). Still need to finalize the documentation but we'll post how to get that all up and running when we get a few spare minutes...

-RC

[Daniele Mannocchi]

I'm thinking that this project is wonderful! I'll follow tutorials as soon as possible. thanks a lot for the infos!

What do you think about buildroot or ubuntu snappy instead of yocto? Do you think is it possible to use them in an AMP?

[Cousins]

Thanks, Daniele! 

We're currently supporting Ubuntu 14.04 with plans to update to the new kernel, etc. soon. It is certainly "possible" to run Snappy, although after significant technical due diligence and extensive communications with both Canonical and Xilinx, it became evident that the Snappy architecture doesn't really mesh well with reconfigurable hardware. We've talked with them on numerous occasions about some changes that could make this work but didn't get the impression it was high on their "to do" list...

-Ryan