SMP Demos for the Raspberry Pi Pico Board
Note: SMP support in the FreeRTOS kernel is available but still being tested.
Introduction
These demos use the FreeRTOS symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) version of the
kernel. The demos target the
Raspberry Pi Pico board, which uses the
RP2040 microcontroller from
Raspberry Pi that
features a Dual-core ARM Cortex M0+ processor.
These demo applications use the
GNU ARM Embedded Toolchain to build the FreeRTOS
Raspberry Pi Pico port. They demonstrate support for
Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP) in the FreeRTOS Kernel.
Source Code Organization
The project files for this demo are located in the FreeRTOS/Demo/CORTEX_M0+_RP2040
directory of the FreeRTOS SMP Demo Git repository. FreeRTOS Port files compiled in
the project are in the FreeRTOS/Source/portable/ThirdParty/GCC/RP2040
directory.
The Demo Applications
The project includes the following demos:
- Blinky Demo.
- Comprehensive Demo.
- Multicore Demo.
Blinky Demo
The blinky demo uses two tasks and one queue.
-
The Queue Send Task:
The queue send task is implemented by the prvQueueSendTask()
function. The
task sits in a loop and sends the value 100 to the queue every 1000 milliseconds
(1 second).
-
The Queue Receive Task:
The queue receive task is implemented by the prvQueueReceiveTask()
function.
The task sits in a loop that blocks on attempts to read from the queue
(no CPU cycles are consumed while the task is blocked), and toggles an LED each
time the value 100 is received from the queue send task. As the queue send
task writes to the queue every 1000 milliseconds, the queue receive task
unblocks and toggles the LED every 1000 milliseconds.
Comprehensive Demo
The comprehensive demo implements a comprehensive test and demo application that,
among other things, demonstrates and/or tests:
The created tasks are from the set of standard demo
tasks that are used by all FreeRTOS port demo applications. They have no
specific functionality, but are created just to demonstrate how to use the
FreeRTOS API, and test the RTOS port.
A "check" task is created that periodically inspects the standard demo tasks
(which contain self monitoring code) to ensure all the tasks are functioning
as expected. The check task toggles the LED each time it executes. This
gives visual feedback of the system health. If the LED is toggling every 3
seconds, then the check task has not discovered any problems. If the LED is
toggling every 200 milliseconds, then the check task has discovered a problem
in one or more tasks.
Multicore Demo
The multicore demo application runs FreeRTOS tasks on one core which interacts
with the code running on the other core using Raspberry Pico SDK synchronization
primitives. There are two versions of the same demo - One version runs FreeRTOS
on core 0, the other runs FreeRTOS on core 1.
Building and Running the RTOS Demo Applications
Building
Setup the Raspberry Pi Pico SDK build environment by following the instructions for
Getting Started With Pico.
Ensure that PICO_SDK_PATH
is set in your environment, or pass it via
-DPICO_SDK_PATH=xxx
on the CMake command line.
Run the following commands:
$ cd FreeRTOS/Demo/CORTEX_M0+_RP2040
$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ cmake ..
$ make
This will generate .uf2
files for each demo application:
Running
- Connect the Raspberry Pi Pico to your computer while holding the
BOOTSEL
button. This will force the board into USB Mass Storage Mode.
- Drag-and-drop the
.uf2
file for the demo you want to run onto the Mass
Storage Device.
RTOS Configuration and Usage Details
- Configuration items specific to the blinky and comprehensive demos are in the
FreeRTOS/Demo/CORTEX_M0+_RP2040/Standard/FreeRTOSConfig.h
file and those specific
to the multicore demo are in the FreeRTOS/Demo/CORTEX_M0+_RP2040/OnEitherCore/FreeRTOSConfig.h
file.
The constants defined in these files can be edited to suit your
application. The following configuration options are specific to the SMP support in the FreeRTOS Kernel:
configNUM_CORES
- Set the number of cores.
configRUN_MULTIPLE_PRIORITIES
- Enable/Disable simultaneously running tasks with multiple priorities.
configUSE_CORE_AFFINITY
- Enable/Disable setting a task's affinity to certain cores.
Source/Portable/MemMang/heap_4.c
is included in the project to provide the
memory allocation required by the RTOS kernel. Please refer to the
Memory Management section of the API
documentation for complete information.
- vPortEndScheduler() has not been implemented.
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