With processes shrinking and approaching the limits of physics, in the last decade we have all got used to multicore chips of increasing complexity and performance extending Moore’s law in our desktops and laptops. In embedded control, where cost, size and robustness demands often take precedence over performance, it seems the time for multicore has finally come with the introduction of a number of innovative multicore microcontrollers for IoT, communication, digital signal processing, and Artificial Intelligence. The FreeRTOS community has recognized this rising tide with many contributions aiming at extending the FreeRTOS kernel to support symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) applications. To make a space for these contributions to consolidate, we have created a new FreeRTOS kernel SMP branch. Among the most influential contributions thus far, we must recognize Espressif with Tensilica Xtensa and RISC-V multi core SoCs for wireless connectivity and IoT (previously a fork of the FreeRTOS kernel) and XMOS with its original xcore platform allowing extreme flexibility in architecting IoT solutions combining different forms of computing (DSP, AI, etc) in a homogeneous environment making development, testing and maintenance simpler and more cost effective. For more information on the XMOS SMP port, see the related press release. Ports for more architectures, vendors and SoCs will be added in the coming months. While still much work is in progress, we invite all FreeRTOS users to give SMP a try, and we welcome all ideas and contributions to this exciting new chapter of the evolution of FreeRTOS.
Get involved by cloning the FreeRTOS SMP Github repository branch, or choose to be notified by Github of updates and activity on this branch.
