Erika Enterprise versus FreeRTOS

Forum related to ERIKA Enterprise and RT-Druid version 2

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Jila.Z
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Posts: 1
Joined: Thu Nov 27, 2008 3:19 pm

Erika Enterprise versus FreeRTOS

Post by Jila.Z » Thu Nov 27, 2008 3:46 pm

Hi there,

I am deciding to choose a realtime kernel for dsPIC family and would like to know the differences between Erika Enterprise and FreeRTOS. What advantages Erika has over FreeRTOS?

Thank you,

Jila

paolo.gai
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Posts: 875
Joined: Thu Dec 07, 2006 12:11 pm

Re:Erika Enterprise versus FreeRTOS

Post by paolo.gai » Thu Nov 27, 2008 11:24 pm

Hi Jila!

Thanks for asking this question on the forum. I do not know all the internals of FreeRTOS, but I can tell you many things about ERIKA:

- ERIKA implements the OSEK/VDX OS API, meaning that the API is an industrial standard recognized in the industry since the 90s

- ERIKA has been designed for a low footprint in mind. the minima version is around 800 bytes flash, and a few bytes RAM

- ERIKA implements a Fixed priority with immediate priority ceiling and with support for preemption thresholds. We also have EDF. FreeRTOS as long as I know has multiple priorities with round robin on the same priority.

- ERIKA supports stack sharing to reduce RAM usage, which is very important for systems with very little RAM. that is, there is no need for a separate stack for all the tasks. Since FreeRTOS has round-robin support, there is a need for a separate stack for each thread, meaning more RAM used and slower context switch

- ERIKA supports dsPIC related features, like the SPLIM register for stack overflow

- ERIKA has a development environment based on eclipse, with an OIL code generator. The advantage here is that everything can be generated statically in flash, meaning less RAM used

- ERIKA has a set of already made examples for the Flex boards, which you can use to start making your application. We also developed a lot of drivers for various devices connected to the FLEX boards.

- ERIKA has support for Scilab/Scicos code generation, and also supports 802.15.4 (zigbee) protocols using openZB

- ERIKA does not have some of the primitives that freeRTOS have, like messagge passing (although some prototypes are there since longtime, but we never integrated them in the main build)

I hope this helps...

PJ

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