I have a task the blocks on xQueueReceive for portMAX_DELAY and I use several other blocks inside that task to aquire mutexes and such. Is there a reliable way to tell if the task has finished with the for loop and is waiting for the main queue receive vs if the task is waiting on an internal block such as waiting for a mutex? My first thought is to use a volatile bool variable to indicate this, setting to isRunning = true at the beginning and isRunning = false at the end of the for loop but I'm not sure that's the best way. How would you do this? If I did use a volatile bool does the possibility exist that it could ever be inconsistent due to a context switch/half-completed write/read?

Umm looks like the answer is a mutex. Am I on the right track?

A volatile boolean would definitely work. There is also a feature request open at the moment that would allow you to query which object a task is blocked on - but that is not implemented yet.

Regards.

Gotcha. Just curious... since volatile is not in itself thread-safe, is it better to use a mutex and have each task lock/unlock when it's done with what it's doing and block until the mutex is available?