Hi, I’m new to FreeRTOS though I have a lot of experience with other RTOSs. I have a serial stream coming into a UART interrupt where the characters are stored in a large buffer. I’m trying to use a counting semaphore to count one particular character, lets call it FLAG, coming in on the UART. For each FLAG, I want to Give the semaphore to a task. In my task, I pend on a Take, then read from buffer until I get FLAG, then I pend for the next Take. This works fine until I send a lot of messages. Eventually, my task hangs on Take. Doing this in a debugger, I can stop and look at my buffer. I can see the last Take stopped at the next to last FLAG, but I can also see the UART received more characters and another FLAG that are sitting in the buffer unread. I tried to dig into FreeRTOS to see if I could find the actual count of the semaphore when a FLAG is in the buffer but the Take doesn’t see it, but all I can find is a void * and don’t know where the count is. I did put in a global counter on Give and Take and I find that Give is always 1 greater than Take when the hang occurs. It appears the Give worked but the Take didn’t see it. At this point I don’t know what else to think other than this is a critical timing issue. Anyone have any ideas on how I might find this problem? Thanks, Dave

To ensure our answer is targetted, please let us know which FreeRTOS port are you using (chip and compiler). Regards.

Hi, sure. I didn’t think it was important, but hey, if I knew what was going on I wouldn’t have posted. V8.1.2 PIC32MX460, 470 and 575. Thanks. Dave

What is the value of configMAXSYSCALLINTERRUPT_PRIORITY in FreeRTOSConfig.h? Have you set the priority of the interrupt to ensure it is at or below the configMAXSYSCALLINTERRUPT_PRIORITY setting? Which method are you using to implement the interrupt? With or without the assembly wrapper? The methods are described on http://www.freertos.org/portPIC32MIPS_MK4.html Maybe not directly related to your question, but if it is always the same task that is being signaled from the interrupt then a task notification will be faster than a counting semaphore: http://www.freertos.org/RTOSTaskNotificationAsCounting_Semaphore.html Regards.

OK, I’m old school. Intuitively (to me), I always make UART ISRs higher priority to avoid dropping characters. But doing that put the UART above configMAXSYSCALLINTERRUPT_PRIORITY. I’ve lowered the UART priority to 3 (same as that macro) and am now testing. So far, 60K+ messages without a failure, 5x more than before. So it appears you’ve found my problem. And so quickly too! THANKS A TON! Dave