Middle-ware support

Hello all,
A bit of a long story, but please bear with me. I’m trying to learn to design IoT in my spare time over the last several years. I’ve been using the TI EK-TM4C129EXL launch pad board which has all the hardware for Ethernet and encryption. I started with TI’s CCS and TI-RTOS (which I’ve been told is really FreeRTOS in a TI wrapper). That project went relatively ok and I had the board serving up simple web pages. TI-RTOS is well integrated with CCS. More-or-less do several clicks and boom! – you have a web server. However, I felt that using CCS and TI-RTOS is platform specific – can only be used for TI. I felt that FreeRTOS (and using IAR for the IDE) is platform independent, FreeRTOS has more name recognition and probably looks better on a resume. However, I feel that I’m hitting a brick wall with FreeRTOS and IoT. It seems that TI does not support FreeRTOS and FreeRTOS does not support TI, and this has caused me a lot of time. FreeRTOS advises against making your own port, but I did that anyway. It was a good learning appearance, but it was frustrating not having the “caned” support. The only support IT has for FreeRTOS is for a Luminary Micro chip. IT bought Luminary Micro over 5 years ago. It seems that was the last of TI’s support for FreeRTOS.

I feel that an any RTOS’s real purpose is to enable advanced middleware like TCI/IP, FAT files system and such. However, recently I opened the FAT file directory in my FreeRTOS tree, but there was only a read me file there. It said that there is no FAT file firmware shipping with FreeRTOS 10. I have not even started to look for Ethernet protocol firmware. Also, I’ve been reading the FreeRTOS web site to learn the nuts and bolts (integration to different micros etc) of implementing such firmware to my chip, but can’t seem to find it. Considering the size of the FreeRTOS community, I am perplexed by the lack of firmware support for FreeRTOS. Is this true or am I missing something?

On another note: Using FreeRTOS is all line coding, which is much slower for me then something like CCS/TI-RTOS. I wonder if I should go back to CCS/TI-RTOS.

Would the AWS Premium Support answer my questions? What is other people’s experience with them? How much does it cost?

Are there microcontroller vendors where their FreeRTOS has better support – any suggestions? Again this would need to be for IoT support.

Thanks George

FreeRTOS provides a kernel and supplemental libraries such as TCP, MQTT, etc., but does not provide board support packages as such but instead uses the drivers provided by the chip vendors. There is a TI reference integration here: https://devices.amazonaws.com/detail/a3G0L00000AANtaUAH/SimpleLink-Wi-Fi®-CC3220SF-Wireless-Microcontroller-LaunchPad-Development-Kit