Developing for Real-Time Operating Systems with FreeRTOS

Course category
RTOS
Training area
Operating Systems
Course code
RTOS-301
Duration
3 days
Additional information
Available for on-site delivery only. Can be delivered remotely or Face-to-Face.

Course Description

The operating environment for a vast range of embedded systems is event-driven and asynchronous. 

Dealing with such an environment with sequential code is challenging and liable to suffer from latency and responsiveness issues. Real-Time Operating Systems (RTOS) provide concurrency services to aid with solving these problems.

Developing concurrent applications with an RTOS is a non-trivial exercise and requires the engineer to understand a new set of problems and master a new set of design and coding mechanisms.

This three-day course provides a practical introduction to the theory, application and development of RTOS-based systems. Particular emphasis is placed on issues relating to resource-constrained embedded applications. Nevertheless, this course is still of significant value to engineers developing non-embedded real-time projects.

The course covers basic concepts, practical issues and coding idioms for concurrent applications. Approximately 50% of the time is given over to practical programming, where students will be developing a case study using the commercial FreeRTOS operating system on an ARM Cortex M target system.

Overview

A three-day course providing a practical introduction to the theory, structure and practice of real-time operating systems.

Course Objectives

After completing the course attendees will:

  • Understand the core components and mechanisms of commercial RTOS
  • Understand the implications of concurrent design.
  • Be able to build efficient, thread-safe code.

Pre-requisites

  • A strong working knowledge of C
  • An understanding of the fundamentals of modern hardware architecture is useful, but not essential.

Who should attend?

Application programmers and software engineers who are new to real-time system development, or wish to improve their concurrency design skills.

Duration

Three days

Course Material

Delegate handbook

Course workshops

Delegates will spend a large proportion of the course working on a target embedded system (based on an ARM Cortex M microcontroller) using the FreeRTOS operating system. The exercises are designed to give representative experience of concurrent systems development. Attendees will be able to apply their learning experience to real-world system development.

The C memory model

  • The C object model
  • Sequential code
  • Concurrent code

Scheduling principles

  • Context switching
  • Preemption
  • Round-robin scheduling
  • Time-triggered scheduling
  • Priority pre-emptive scheduling
  • Creating tasks

Task management

  • Task creation
  • Creating task functions
  • Static vs dynamic task creation
  • Putting a task to sleep
  • Terminating tasks
  • Priority management

Mutual exclusion

  • Race conditions
  • Mutexes
  • Building thread-safe resources

Mutual exclusion issues

  • Priority inversion
  • Priority Inheritance Protocol
  • Priority Ceiling Protocol
  • Recursive deadlock
  • Cyclic dependency deadlock
  • Deadlock-through-death

Task synchronisation

  • Events
  • Conjunctive and disjunctive events
  • Unilateral and bilateral synchronisation
  • Signals
  • Condition variables

Event groups

  • Events as signals
  • Creating events
  • Conjunctive and disjunctive waiting
  • Synchronising multiple tasks with events

Semaphore as signal

  • Unidirectional, persistent consuming signals
  • The Semaphore-as-signal pattern
  • The Blocking Monitor pattern
  • Counting semaphores
  • Bi-lateral synchronisation

Condition variables

  • The Guarded Suspension pattern
  • Condition variables

Resource pools

  • Multiple-Reader, Single-Writer pattern
  • Readers-Writer locks

Message queues

  • Asynchronous communication with data
  • Message queues
  • Marshalling and non-marshalling queues
  • Queuing policies
  • The Asynchronous Message pattern
  • Dealing with variable-sized data
  • Queue Sets
  • Mailboxes

Timers

  • Software timers
  • The FreeRTOS Daemon task
  • One-shot and auto-reload timers
  • Timer management

RTOS interaction from interrupts

  • Interrupts and the OS
  • Communicating from an ISR to a task
  • Problems with blocking calls
  • The ISR-safe API
  • The Deferred Interrupt model
  • The Deferred Centralised Interrupt model
  • Configuring interrupt priorities

Memory management

  • Problems with dynamic memory
  • The FreeRTOS memory models
  • Dynamic-object lifetime management issues