I am using FreeRTOS on a Cortex M4 platform (specifically an EFM32 from Silicon Labs). I'm doing a bunch of setup prior to starting the operating system; allocating things, creating the semaphores I'll need, etc. These make calls to things like pvPortMalloc and xSemaphoreCreateBinary. I've noticed that these calls will alter the BASEPRI register to a value of 0xA000. This masks off a bunch of interrupts, and essentially makes it so that the system won't trigger interrupts that aren't the highest priority until freeRTOS has started the scheduler.

I can get by with calling malloc instead of pvPortMalloc when freeRTOS isn't running, but I need to call xSemaphoreCreateBinary. Can someone tell me how to properly allow this call to be made prior to the scheduler being started, such that I can still have interrupts working? I've tried just calling "setBASEPRIO(0)", but this causes me to hit an Assert once the scheduler is running and an interrupt fires. Even if I manually call "setBASEPRIO(191)" before starting the scheduler.

Most of the FreeRTOS API functions are designed to leave interrupt disabled if they are called before the scheduler has started. This dates back to a time when a lot of support requests resulted from interrupts in application code trying to use the FreeRTOS API before the scheduler was started. If interrupt are disable between the FreeRTOS API first being used and the scheduler being started then that can't happen. You can manually set the basepri back to 0, or alternatively create a configuration task, start the scheduler, perform any initialisation you want from the configuration task, then re-purpose the configuration task once the configuration is complete.

Ah, I had an additional problem with an interrupt being set to too high of a priority, which I'd added while attempting to diagnose the problem originally. Thanks!