'Officially Supported' and 'Contributed' FreeRTOS Code
[RTOS Ports]

Each supported architecture and compiler combination is considered to be a separate FreeRTOS port. At the time of writing there are 54 ports.

A demo application is a project that runs a specific port on a specific hardware platform.

The microcontroller architecture specific part of a FreeRTOS port is called the port layer. Each port layer is either 'officially supported' or 'contributed'. This page explains the differences between the two.

Officially Supported Ports

Officially supported ports:

• Are included in the main FreeRTOS .zip file release (contributed ports having now been moved to the FreeRTOS Interactive site for FreeRTOS releases 6.0.4 and later).

• Include at least one demo application that is documented on the FreeRTOS.org site.

  A demo application is a pre-configured project that targets a specific development board and uses a specific tool chain. It is intended to allow ‘out of the box’ usage even for new users, and includes many examples of how the FreeRTOS API can be used. Some official ports include multiple such demo projects to provide users a choice of both hardware and build environments.

• Are of known origin, removing doubt as to their intellectual property ownership. This in turn allows commercial licenses and support contracts to be (optionally) supplied by WITTENSTEIN high integrity systems under the OpenRTOS brand. WITTENSTEIN are a global engineering company who license the rights to sell commercial versions of FreeRTOS from the FreeRTOS owners, Real Time Engineers Ltd. WITTENSTEIN and Real Time Engineers Ltd. are therefore separate legal entities.

• Have been written and/or fully inspected and tested by Real Time Engineers ltd. or a completely trusted partner.

• Are, in general and where possible, maintained and updated as new versions of the core FreeRTOS source code or new versions of the relevant build tools are released.

• Can normally be supported on the freely accessible support forum.

Contributed Ports

Contributed ports:

• Are provided by FreeRTOS community users, rather than Real Time Engineers Ltd. directly.

• Are made freely available for download from the FreeRTOS Interactive site.

• Can only be provided under the standard open source FreeRTOS license. Commercial licenses are not offered for contributed code.

• Are documented by the contributors themselves. The amount and quality of documentation provided therefore varies between contributed packages.

• Often cannot be directly supported by Real Time Engineers Ltd.

Copyright (C) 2004-2010 Richard Barry. Copyright (C) 2010-2012 Real Time Engineers Ltd.
Any and all data, files, source code, html content and documentation included in the FreeRTOS distribution or available on this site are the exclusive property of Real Time Engineers Ltd.. See the files license.txt (included in the distribution) and this copyright notice for more information. FreeRTOS^TM and FreeRTOS.org^TM are trade marks of Real Time Engineers Ltd..