Why OpenPicoRTOS ?

[jnaulet]

A little bit of history...

picoRTOS/OpenPicoRTOS is an idea that started 2 years ago, while i was working for an aerospace company that asked me to port FreeRTOS to their architecture.

I did the job but was heavily dissatisfied by the lack of code safety in that system. I told my fellow colleagues "This stuff is junk, gimme 6 months and i can do much better".
Everyone got a good laugh and forgot about it. But i didn't, and started to work on a safety critical RTOS of my own the next day.

Then i moved to Sweden, found a position at an automotive company. The project was frozen and never published due to perfectionism, mostly.

I had to work with FreeRTOS again and got very poor performance out of a C2000 platform. I needed something to make benchmark comparisons and help diagnose where the inefficiencies were.
I couldn't sleep that night, so at 3am, i revived the project, published it on GitHub as picoRTOS and made an overnight port to c2000/c28x. No merits here. It was directly borrowed from IvanZuy's work: https://github.com/IvanZuy/freertos_c28x

The results were stunning... picoRTOS was running at least 10x faster than FreeRTOS, allowing a 50Khz scheduling (and still doing useful work) while FreeRTOS struggled to do anything useful above 5Khz.

Ports were then made to various other platforms, including PowerPC e200z4 and z7, which i knew quite well due to a port of FreeRTOS-SMP i had to make a few weeks prior (with a lot of cursing and swearing).

These ports (including the c2000 that was not even mine to begin with) are now unavailable after my ex-employer wrongfully claimed ownership over them.

And here comes OpenPicoRTOS, which is a complete makeover of the system, offering a similar interface, not entirely backwards-compatible and not supporting any platform used by this car manufacturer (PowerPC and C2000).
It supports mostly only open-source platforms, like the ones provided by Arduino, Adafruit or Raspberry.