Hard Fault with FreeRTOS+FatFS on STM32

Hi all.
I have never really been the RTOS guy but I have decided to give it a try now, especially because of the need of a proper IP stack with Socket integration.
So I decided to get the FreeRTOS example with the lwIP stack provided by ST running on my STM32-E407 from Olimex, that contains an STM32F4ZGT6.
After successfully adding the FatFS library I was able to both get Ethernet and SD card working great. But then I started making my LCD library and got that working, but when I tried my BMP writing routine, which repeatedly fetches 512 bytes (fills a buffer) from a file the application reads and displays two full buffers but then goes into a Hard Fault. I have tried getting most information out of this Hard Fault exception as possible which can be seen below:
[Hard fault handler - all numbers in hex]
R0 = 20001158
R1 = 1eaf00b4
R2 = 80031a5
R3 = 80031a5
R12 = 20000cac
LR [R14] = a5a5a5a5  subroutine call return address
PC [R15] = fffffffd  program counter
PSR = 80078c2
BFAR = 1eaf00b4
CFSR = 8200
HFSR = 40000000
DFSR = 1
AFSR = 0
SCB_SHCSR = 400
I am using the pvPortMalloc(512) to get a pointer to the required 512 bytes buffer, but that didn’t fix the problem. You can download the CoIDE project (IDE for GCC compiler) and have a look for yourself: http://www.tkjelectronics.dk/uploads/TheBlastFootball_FreeRTOS_HardFault.zip
I really hope that someone can bring me some suggestions. Best Regards
Thomas Jespersen

Hard Fault with FreeRTOS+FatFS on STM32

The registers in your post are strange. The PC looks how I would expect LR to look in an interrupt, and LR looks like it has been loaded from a stack byte that has never been written to since the stack was created. Do you have stack overflow protection on?

Hard Fault with FreeRTOS+FatFS on STM32

I don’t know about the Hard Fault register output either, as I agree with you that the PC looks very odd!
No, I haven’t enabled stack overflow due to the missing function to make it work -> ” undefined reference to `vApplicationStackOverflowHook’ ”

Hard Fault with FreeRTOS+FatFS on STM32

I mean, I haven’t implemented this monitoring function to warn and require a restart.

Hard Fault with FreeRTOS+FatFS on STM32

Thanks a lot – giving that hint to me made me find the reason for the problem! :-) When creating the thread which executes the BMP LCD write function I didn’t make the stack for this thread large enough to hold the buffer.
The stack was only set to 256 bytes, where the buffer itself takes 512! By increasing the size to 1024 bytes the program works perfectly.
xTaskCreate(UserGUI, "UserGUI", [b]1024[/b], NULL, GUI_TASK_PRIO, NULL);
Thanks a lot.