A7 evaluation kit with great FreeRTOS support

Hello,

I would like to benchmark some algorithms on FreeRTOS on the Cortex A7 target. I was reading the kernel ports and supported documentation page to try to find the best candidate.

Any suggestion?

In term of constraint, I just need to be able to play with CPU frequency, FPU support and classic stuff as GPIO, task etc… I also need a lot of memory but I think that this is not an issue on A7. I just want to have hardware that already have a FreeRTOS support to focus my work on benchmark work and not waste all my time with integration and port issue.

Thanks,
Arthur.

You could look at some of the Atmel (now Microchip) SAMA5 boards, A5 rather than A7, but not much difference to the kernel. This link is to a rather old project. Check the Microchip tools for something newer.

Hi rtel,

I am not confident enough to take another CortexA for my benchmark even if the theoretical difference is negligible.

During my research, so far my best match was with the imx6ultralite from NXP. The maximum CPU frequency of fetching my constraint. I just need to check that I am able to build an RTOS firmware for this hardware. If I am able to build a piece of software easily I will probably order an evaluation kit. There is a lot of stock available. Because yes I also need a board that I can find easily on market.

@Evanok I don’t know of any Cortex-A7 specific BSPs available. In general though, I think the hard part will be porting drivers to your target platform. NXP provides a FreeRTOS SDK for their MPUs with a combination of Cortex-M and Cortex-A MCUs, but not for Cortex-A only parts.

You may find Trusted-Firmware-A helpful for drivers and such, since it operates in a bare-metal configuration. Similarly, u-boot may be helpful as a reference as well, but do note that it has a more restrictive license (GNU GPL) compared to TF-A (BSD).

The best getting started references for your use case is probably this page which provides guidance for porting to Cortex-A MPUs.

Generally, Cortex-A cores are targeted towards more complex / full featured operating systems like linux or QNX.