FreeRTOS SDK v2.13 release for i.MX 8M platforms

  1. For the impatient
  2. What's new?
  3. Architecture
    1. How it works?
    2. Where is the code running from?
    3. When is the MCU useful?
    4. Resource Domain Controller (RDC)
    5. Remote Processor Messaging (RPMsg)
    6. Where can I find more documentation?
    7. Remoteproc
  4. Build instructions
    1. Development environment setup
    2. Download the BSP
    3. Build the FreeRTOS apps
  5. Run the demo apps
    1. Basic setup
    2. Hello World app
    3. RPMsg TTY demo
    4. RPMsg Ping Pong demo
Nitrogen8M Mini SBCNitrogen8M Mini SMARCNitrogen8M Mini SOMNitrogen8M Nano SOMNitrogen8M Plus SMARCNitrogen8M Plus SOMNitrogen8M SBCNitrogen8M SOM

One of the many advantages of developing with NXP's i.MX 8M Family of application processors is the ability to utilize both the Cortex-A53 as well as the Cortex-M core. This blog post will first present the architecture of the i.MX 8M heterogeneous processors as a starting point for the discussion, and then explain how to build and run the FreeRTOS SDK v2.13 on its MCU. The i.MX 8MQ and i.MX 8M Mini processors are coupling a Cortex-A53 cluster (4 cores) alongside a Cortex-M4 whereas the i.MX 8M Nano and i.MX 8M Plus are using a Cortex-M7.

For the impatient

You can download any of our currently available OS images for our i.MX 8M platforms:

Note that you can find pre-built binaries of the examples here for each CPU variant:

There are 3 examples for each variant:

  • hello_world.bin
    • simple application printing "hello world" on the M-core serial port
  • rpmsg_lite_pingpong_rtos_linux_remote.bin
    • ping pong examples between both CPU clusters using RPMSG
  • rpmsg_lite_str_echo_rtos.bin
    • TTY example showing serial communication between CPU clusters using RPMSG

You can then start your first Hello World application on the Cortex-M manually (after copying one of the binary above to your storage): 

=> load mmc 0 $m4loadaddr hello_world.bin
=> bootaux $m4loadaddr
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