freertos/freertos-smp-demos

This repository contains example applications showing how FreeRTOS, a small operating system for embedded devices, can run on multi-core processors. It's essentially a collection of ready-to-use demo projects for specific hardware, like the Raspberry Pi Pico and XCORE AI chips. However, it's important to know upfront that this project is deprecated: the demos have been moved to a different repository, and this one no longer receives updates or accepts contributions. FreeRTOS is a real-time operating system designed for microcontrollers and small embedded devices. "Symmetric Multiprocessing" or "SMP" means the system can distribute work across multiple processor cores simultaneously. The demos in this repo show how to set up the FreeRTOS kernel to take advantage of those multiple cores, so instead of one processor doing everything sequentially, tasks can run in parallel on different cores. Someone building a gadget with a multi-core microcontroller would use these demos as a starting point. For example, if you're developing a robotics project using a Raspberry Pi Pico and need certain operations to run at the same time without interfering with each other, these examples show you how to configure the software to do that. Rather than building everything from scratch, you can look at a working example and adapt it to your needs. The project is built in C and uses a feature called "Git submodules," which is a way to pull in the FreeRTOS kernel source code from a separate repository. This means if you download the repository as a ZIP file from GitHub, you won't get the full codebase, you need to use specific git commands to clone it properly. Since the project is deprecated, anyone looking to use these demos should head to the FreeRTOS-Community-Supported-Demos repository instead, where the same examples are being actively maintained and updated.