Features Overview
[About FreeRTOS]

FreeRTOS Features:

See also

• About FreeRTOS
• The Memory Usage, Boot Times and Context Switch Times FAQ

FreeRTOS is a scale-able real time kernel designed specifically for small embedded systems. Highlights include:

• Free RTOS scheduler - preemptive, cooperative and hybrid configuration options, with optional time slicing.
• The SafeRTOS derivative product provides a high level of confidence in the code integrity.
• Includes a tickless mode for low power applications.
• RTOS objects (tasks, queues, semaphores, software timers, mutexes and event groups) can be created using either dynamically or statically allocated RAM.
• Tiny footprint.
• Official support for >30 embedded system architectures (counting ARM7 and ARM Cortex-M3 as one architecture each).
• FreeRTOS-MPU supports the ARM Cortex-M3 Memory Protection Unit (MPU).
• Designed to be small, simple and easy to use. Typically a RTOS kernel binary image will be in the region of 4K to 9K bytes.
• Very portable source code structure, predominantly written in C.
• Supports both real time tasks and co-routines.
• Direct to task notifications, queues, binary semaphores, counting semaphores, recursive semaphores and mutexes for communication and synchronisation between tasks, or between real time tasks and interrupts.
• Innovative event group (or event flag) implementation.
• Mutexes with priority inheritance.
• Efficient software timers.
• Powerful execution trace functionality.
• Stack overflow detection options.
• Pre-configured RTOS demo applications for selected single board computers allowing 'out of the box' operation and fast learning curve.
• Free monitored forum support, or optional commercial support and licensing.
• No software restriction on the number of real time tasks that can be created.
• No software restriction on the number of task priorities that can be used.
• No restrictions imposed on task priority assignment - more than one real time task can be assigned the same priority.
• Free development tools for many supported architectures.
• Free embedded software source code.
• Royalty free.
• Cross development from a standard Windows host.

plus ... some older links

• Embedded Ethernet example applications.
• 'How FreeRTOS.org^TM works': Source code explained.
• Embedded software application design: Tips for using FreeRTOS on small embedded systems.