Hands-On RTOS with Microcontrollers

Task Signaling and Communication Mechanisms

In the previous chapter, the task was introduced. Toward the end, we looked at examples of preemptive scheduling for multiple tasks in the system and the fact that a task will run whenever it isn't waiting on something (in the blocked state) and can do something useful. In this chapter, the core mechanisms for task signaling and inter-task communication will be briefly introduced. These primitives are fundamental to event-driven parallel programming, which is the foundation of a well implemented RTOS-based application.

Rather than dive right into the FreeRTOS API, each primitive will be presented along with a few graphical examples and some suggestions on when each of the mechanisms can be used. ...