Building FreeRTOS for x86

Question

I read online that it was possible to build FreeRTOS on Windows for an external device. Can you build it for x86 on ubuntu?

Thanks

Answer 1

According to the FreeRTOS ports page the supported tools for x86 builds are:

• Visual Studio 2010 Express
• MingW
• Open Watcom
• Borland
• Paradigm

so the answer to your question would appear to be no.

Since the above are all Windows-based tools I would guess that you need a Windows PC to build an x86 version of FreeRTOS, although you might be able to use an emulator such as WINE under Ubuntu.

Answer 2

There are several things you can do on an X86 with FreeRTOS.

The first is to run FreeRTOS as the OS on the CPU. FreeRTOS is intended for microcontrollers, so only (officially) support real mode (16-bit). This is valid if you are running on something like a 186 based microcontroller, like those that used to be manufactured by AMD and then (now?) RDC. You can also run the code on any X86, but only in real mode, and it used to be the development platform for the core FreeRTOS code using tools such as Open Watcom. I'm not sure of an equivalent Linux hosted 16 bit compiler, but there might be one.

The other was of using FreeRTOS on X86 is to run the FreeRTOS simulator. When that is done, FreeRTOS is not the kernel running the CPU, Windows or Linux is running the CPU, but there are Windows or Linuxs thread run the FreeRTOS code. That is now the preferred way of doing core development work - but it is just a simulator meaning the timing is all over the place and simulated time is much lower than real time (because the timing resolution and accuracy in Windows is so low compared to a real time system).

The Windows simulator can be run with Visual Studio (free version), and that port is maintained. You can also use it with MingW and Eclipse, although the demo is less featured, and I believe there are some problems with later versions of Eclipse.

The Linux FreeRTOS simulator is a contributed port, so I can't really comment on it.

Windows simulator page: http://www.freertos.org/FreeRTOS-Windows-Simulator-Emulator-for-Visual-Studio-and-Eclipse-MingW.html

Linux simulator page: http://www.freertos.org/FreeRTOS-simulator-for-Linux.html

Regards.