Hands-On RTOS with Microcontrollers

Comparing FreeRTOS heap implementations

Because FreeRTOS targets such a wide range of MCUs and applications, it ships with five different dynamic allocation schemes, all of which are implemented with a heap. The different heap implementations allow different levels of heap functionality. They are included in the portable/MemMang directory as heap_1.c, heap_2.c, heap_3.c, heap_4.c, and heap_5.c.

A note on memory pools: Many other RTOSes include memory pools as an implementation for dynamic memory allocation. A memory pool achieves dynamic allocation by only allocating and freeing fixed-size blocks. By fixing the block size, the problem of fragmentation is avoided in memory-constrained environments. The downside to memory pools is that the ...