'Officially Supported' and 'Contributed' FreeRTOS Code
[RTOS Ports]

Officially supported source code is wholly owned by Amazon Web Services.

Each supported architecture and compiler combination is considered to be a separate FreeRTOS port.

A demo application is a project that runs a specific port on a specific hardware platform.

The microcontroller architecture specific part of a FreeRTOS port is called the port layer. Each port layer is either 'officially supported' or 'contributed'. This page explains the differences between the two.

Officially Supported Ports

Officially supported ports:

• Are included in the main FreeRTOS .zip file release (contributed ports having now been moved to the FreeRTOS Interactive site for FreeRTOS releases 6.0.4 and later).

• Include at least one demo application that is documented on the FreeRTOS.org site.

  A demo application is a pre-configured project that targets a specific development board and uses a specific tool chain. It is intended to allow ‘out of the box' usage even for new users, and includes many examples of how the FreeRTOS API can be used. Some official ports include multiple such demo projects to provide users a choice of both hardware and build environments.

• Are of known origin, removing doubt as to their intellectual property ownership. This in turn allows commercial licenses and support contracts to be (optionally) supplied by WITTENSTEIN high integrity systems under the OpenRTOS brand.

• Have been written and/or fully inspected and tested by Amazon Web Services Inc or a completely trusted partner.

• Are, in general and where possible, maintained and updated as new versions of the core FreeRTOS source code or new versions of the relevant build tools are released.

• Can normally be supported on the freely accessible and monitored support forum.

Contributed Ports

Contributed ports:

• Are provided by FreeRTOS community users, rather than Amazon Web Services directly.

• Are made freely available for download from the FreeRTOS Interactive site.

• Can only be provided under the standard open source FreeRTOS license. Commercial licenses are not offered for contributed code.

• Are documented by the contributors themselves. The amount and quality of documentation provided therefore varies between contributed packages.

• Often cannot be directly supported by Amazon Web Services.