Hands-On RTOS with Microcontrollers

Keeping an eye on heap space

If your application makes regular use of the FreeRTOS heap, then you should strongly consider using the configUSE_MALLOC_FAILED_HOOK configuration and associated hook, vApplicationMallocFailedHook. This hook is called anytime a call to pvMalloc() fails.

Of course, while you're doing this, you're being a responsible programmer and checking the return value of malloc and handling these error cases anyway... so this hook may be redundant.

The steps for setting this up are the same as in the previous hook:

1. Add the following in FreeRTOSConfig.h:

#define configUSE_MALLOC_FAILED_HOOK 1

2. In a *.c file, add the failed malloc hook:

void vApplicationMallocFailedHook( void ){ __disable_irq(); while(1);}

There are also ...