Assessment of the difficulty in porting CPU architecture for freeRTOS

Kernel
1

Hello everyone! I am working on implementing a tool to assess the complexity of CPU architecture porting. It primarily focuses on RISC-V architecture porting. As part of my dataset, I have collected the freeRTOS-Kernel project. I would like to gather community opinions to support my assessment. I appreciate your help and response! Based on scanning tools, the porting complexity is determined to be moderate, with a moderate amount of code related to the CPU architecture in the project. It would require a professional team, but not a large-scale one, to handle this task (referring to the overall workload from adapting the project to a specific architecture to achieving full functionality on that architecture). Is this assessment accurate? I look forward to your help and response.

2

“moderate” is a very subjective term, so it’s hard to say. RISC-V is easier than a MIPS, and harder than a Cortex-M, so if “moderate” is not an extreme one way or the other, then it might be accurate. Compare the amount of code in the MIPS port, where pushing and popping registers and interrupt nesting is all done manually using register relative addressing, to that of the Cortex-M port, which pushes many registers itself, has push multiple instructions, and automatically switches stacks…

3

Thank you for your reply. Do you know about rt-thread? Do you think that when transplanting to riscv architecture, rt-thread and freertos have roughly the same difficulty in transplanting? The second question is that our tool scans a lot of assembly code, so we get a moderate porting difficulty through the final predictor, do you think it’s reasonable?I look forward to your answer again, thank you!

4

As Richard stated above this is a rather subjective question. The exact answer would depend on the CPU architecture being ported, the experience and background of the developer performing the work, or as you are now suggesting, the RTOS itself.

If you have a detailed question about porting FreeRTOS to a specific CPU architecture I would suggest creating a new forum post and I’m sure you would get some good help and suggestions.

Thanks!