I've written some functions that I need to use from a regular task context as well as from interrupts. Since the functions are dealing with a shared resource, I am using critical sections to synchronize access to it. However, critical sections cannot be used inside interrupts since (at least on the ARM7 GCC port) this crashes the system.

Rather than writing regular and "FromISR" versions of the functions, they should themselves check in which context they're being called and call taskENTER_CRITICAL & taskEXIT_CRITICAL in the regular case, or not if it's an ISR.

So, is there a way to determine the execution context? Or do I need to set a flag myself in my interrupt handlers?

Setting your own flag would be easiest, but you can always look at the mode bits in CPSR to see if you are in IRQ mode or System mode.

Thanks. Reading CPSR seems like a nice solution but I don't know how to code that in asm and it is of course platform dependent.

It would be nicer if on all ports FreeRTOS could provide this information and/or make taskENTER_CRITICAL & taskEXIT_CRITICAL interrupt safe. That would simply involve doing nothing if an interrupt is running, which would also make more of the API interrupt safe (e.g. uxQueueMessagesWaiting).