Assessment of Efficient Dispatching in FreeRTOS

Abstract

This study investigates the efficiency of task dispatchers in real-world implementations. We focus on evaluating various task dispatching methods based on five distinct data structures and their impact on computation overhead and performance in FreeRTOS. By using a real-world setup, we analyze the merits and drawbacks of each data structure and corresponding task dispatcher implementation. Our preliminary findings suggest that task dispatcher efficiency highly depends on the task set size and their respective periods, with alternative dispatchers potentially outperforming the List-based implementation, which is presently utilized in FreeRTOS, in certain scenarios. Ultimately, this study seeks to provide valuable insights for system designers and developers, emphasizing the importance of tailoring task dispatchers to specific task sets for improved efficiency and reliability in real-time systems.

Publication
The 17th annual workshop on Operating Systems Platforms for Embedded Real-Time applications