Hi,

Has anyone successfully executed FreeRTOS on their Spartan 3e starter kit?

I've built a basic MicroBlaze system (with the EDK 8.1) using the DDRSRAM and all of the needed peripherals, downloaded the freeRTOS code, ported the LED driver functions to work with the starter kit, and built the kernel / demo application.

I am able to download the code into the external memory and single step through the code. When attemping to run through the demo application, I always get an error signal when vStartScheduler is called.

I then commented out all of the calls to create the tasks and I was able to call the vStartSchedular code without any error. At this point I assumed that the idle task was running without any issue.

I then tried to add simple tasks such as toggling an LED. However, it never executes.

After some debugging, it appears as though the code hangs when vStartFirstTask is called.

Any thoughts / ideas / suggestions?

Thanks,
Scott Nortman

Hello Scott,

This isn't the answer you're looking for - but let
me tell you about a recent experience.

I was working on a project with several FPGA's doing
bringup - and getting the uBlaze demo. running was something that I wanted to do just to blink the LEDs
so to speak - this was a proprietary design so I modified the demo. to run on the target. I was using the latest XPS from Xilinx and updated all of the cores (including ChipScope). I took a stab at the correct memory map (no harm done) - but I had to take another approach due to time constraints (talking about project times here...) - anyway - I did have the
debugger running and the app. 'thought' it was blinking the ole LEDs. The scheduler was definitely running. I wanted to pick up the demo. board the Richard uses as a sanity check - I have a good buddy at Xilinx that's the manager of one of the major groups and wanted to pick up something from him vs. paying for the demo. board outright - but like I mentioned I had to take another tack - not that the demo. isn't a good thing... Anyway - to answer part of your question at least - I know that the scheduler was running because tasks were running. The FPGA I was using had 2 PPC cores so I was trying to figure out the uBlaze mapping vs. the two cores...

Anyway - FreeRTOS was running - I think that's what you want to hear.

HTH,
John W.

Thanks for the info. I'll spend some more time looking into this and hopefully I'll make some progress.

--Scott