Developed in partnership with the world’s leading chip companies over a 15 year period, the FreeRTOS kernel is a market leading real time operating system (or RTOS), and the de-facto standard solution for microcontrollers and small microprocessors.
Most people take products to market without ever contacting us, but with the complete peace of mind that they could opt to switch to a fully indemnified commercial license (with dedicated support) at any time.
FreeRTOS is designed to be simple and easy to use: Only 3 source files that are common to all RTOS ports, and one microcontroller specific source file are required, and its API is designed to be simple and intuitive.
The RL78 port can create 13 tasks, 2 queues and 4 software timers in under 4K bytes of RAM!
Why choose FreeRTOS?
“It’s probably safe to say at this point that FreeRTOS goes through more ‘peer-review’ than any other RTOS available on the planet. I have used it in several projects – one of which was a multiprocessor environment that used more than 64 processors and needed to run for months reliably. The RTOS core performed well. Take FreeRTOS for a spin.” – John Westmoreland
FreeRTOS provides the best of all worlds: FreeRTOS is truly free and supported, even when used in commercial applications. The FreeRTOS open source MIT license does not require you to expose your proprietary IP. You can take a product to market using FreeRTOS without even talking to us, let alone paying any fees, and thousands of people do just that. If, at any time, you would like to receive additional backup, or if your legal team require additional written guarantees or indemnification, then there is a simple low cost commercial upgrade path. Your peace of mind comes with the knowledge that you can opt to take the commercial route at any time you choose.
Here are some reasons why FreeRTOS is a good choice for your next application – FreeRTOS…
Provides a single and independent solution for many different architectures and development tools.
Is known to be reliable. Confidence is assured by the activities undertaken by the SafeRTOS sister project.
Is feature rich and still undergoing continuous active development.
Has a minimal ROM, RAM and processing overhead. Typically an RTOS kernel binary image will be in the region of 6K to 12K bytes.
Is very simple – the core of the RTOS kernel is contained in only 3 C files. The majority of the many files included in the .zip file download relate only to the numerous demonstration applications.
Is truly free for use in commercial applications (see license conditions for details).
Has commercial licensing, professional support and porting services available in the form of OPENRTOS from our partner WITTENSTEIN high integrity systems.
Has a migration path to SafeRTOS, which includes certifications for the medical, automotive and industrial sectors.
Is well established with a large and ever growing user base.
Contains a pre-configured example for each port. No need to figure out how to setup a project – just download and compile!
Has an excellent, monitored, and active free support forum.
Has the assurance that commercial support is available should it be required.
Provides ample documentation.
Is very scalable, simple and easy to use.
FreeRTOS offers a smaller and easier real time processing alternative for applications where eCOS, embedded Linux (or Real Time Linux) and even uCLinux won’t fit, are not appropriate, or are not available.
FreeRTOS Announcements Mailing List
You can keep up to date with very occasional FreeRTOS announcements by adding yourself to the FreeRTOS mailing list. Emails are infrequent and kept short. We respect your privacy, so do not provide email addresses to any third party, or any other Amazon Web Services organisation. Every email sent contains unsubscribe instructions.
