Introduction to FreeRTOS Queues
Keywords: Embedded systems, ARM, FreeRTOS, STM32F4, Tasks, Queues
“A Queue is a Data Structure that holds a finite number of fixed-size data items and follows FIFO (First in First Out) access mechanism”.
Most of the low power low end embedded systems follows legacy hardware architecture of shared memory where any part of volatile memory can be read/modified/written by any part of embedded software running on the hardware. This is not a big issue until the software gets complex and runs multiple units of independent software tasks accessing shared memory simultaneously e.g. System is performing multi-tasking under an RTOS.
In such systems one of the major problem is memory protection and inter-tasks communication. Though some part of shared memory can be reserved (via some global variables/arrays) that can be written by one task and read by another task when required; The problem in such systems arises when it comes the memory operation Atomicity.
It is quite probable that one task is in the process of writing data to the shared memory and has partially completed the write operation (like writing to a large array) when a context switch occures and another task reads it assuming its the correct data. A more worse situation occurs when multiple tasks are trying to write data to the same shared memory simultaneously.
As an example, the following video shows two freeRTOS tasks trying to write string to same serial Port. As can be seen while the one task has not yet finished writing to serial port, the context switch preempt the first task and runs the second task resulting into mixing of two strings. The exact same things may happen in case of shared memory.
* Task1 Prints: “Message From Task-1: FreeRTOS Task-1 Running...“
* Task2 Prints: “Message From Task-2: FreeRTOS Task-2 Running...“
In order to tackle such problem, queues are used that ensures the data can’t be written to queue if its full (prevent replacing data) and can’t be read if its empty (prevents reading garbage values).
Queues are used to provide communication channels between various independent pieces of code like task-to-task, task-to-ISR and ISRs-to-task communication.
Generally in Queue, data is written to the back; called tail of the queue and removed from the front; called head of the queue – Figure-1 [1].
1. FreeRTOS Queues:
FreeRTOS implements an enhanced version of generic Queue (FIFO). A queue can only be written to back (tail) and be read in revered order (from front to tail) i.e. FIFO (First in First out). This means if a message is written last, it will be read last as well. Thus Queue messaging mechanism has no message priority associated with them. FreeRTOS provides a partially way around it by providing APIs that can write both to the front and back of Queue. Thus the message written to the front will be read first (sort of high priority). This makes freeRTOS Queues follow both FIFO and LIFO mechanism. In this way FreeRTOS queues get somehow closer to POSIX messaging mechanism. More details are covered in the APIs discussion.
2. FreeRTOS Queues APIs:
This following APIs are used for freeRTOS Queue main Operations.
2.1 xQueueCreate():
Before a queue can be used, it must be created explicitly with predefined length and item size it will hold. Queues are referenced by handles, which are variables of type QueueHandle_t. The xQueueCreate() API function creates a queue and returns a QueueHandle_t as a references to the queue just created.
| Parameter Name | Description |
|---|---|
| uxQueueLength | The maximum number of items that the queue being created can hold at any one time. |
| uxItemSize | The size, in bytes, of each data item that can be stored in the queue. |
| Return Value | If NULL is returned, then the queue cannot be created because there is insufficient heap memory available for FreeRTOS to allocate the queue data structures and storage area. If a non-NULL value is returned, the queue has been created successfully. The returned value should be stored as the handle to the created queue. |
2.2 xQueueSendToBack() and xQueueSendToFront():
BaseType_t xQueueSendToBack( QueueHandle_t xQueue, const void * pvItemToQueue, TickType_t xTicksToWait );
BaseType_t xQueueSendToFront( QueueHandle_t xQueue, const void * pvItemToQueue, TickType_t xTicksToWait );
xQueueSendToBack() is used to send data to the back (tail) of a queue. xQueueSendToFront() is used to send data to the front (head) of a queue.
| Parameter Name | Description |
|---|---|
| xQueue | The handle of the queue to which the data is being sent (written). The queue handle will have been returned from the call to xQueueCreate() used to create the queue. |
| pvItemToQueue | A pointer to the data to be copied into the queue. The size of each item that the queue can hold is set when the queue is created, so this many bytes will be copied from pvItemToQueue into the queue storage area. |
| xTicksToWait | The maximum amount of time the task should remain in the Blocked state to wait for space to become available on the queue, should the queue already be full. Both xQueueSendToFront() and xQueueSendToBack() will return immediately if xTicksToWait is zero and the queue is already full. The block time is specified in tick periods, so the absolute time it represents is dependent on the tick frequency. The macro pdMS_TO_TICKS() can be used to convert a time specified in milliseconds into a time specified in ticks. Setting xTicksToWait to portMAX_DELAY will cause the task to wait indefinitely (without timing out), provided INCLUDE_vTaskSuspend is set to 1 in FreeRTOSConfig.h. |
| Return Value | There are two possible return values: 1. pdPASS Returned only if data was successfully sent to the queue. If a block time was specified (xTicksToWait was not zero), then it is possible the calling task was placed into the Blocked state, to wait for space to become available in the queue, before the function returned, but data was successfully written to the queue before the block time expired. 2. errQUEUE_FULL Returned if data could not be written to the queue because the queue was already full. If a block time was specified (xTicksToWait was not zero) then the calling task will have been placed into the Blocked state to wait for another task or interrupt to make space in the queue, but the specified block time expired before that happened. |
Note: Do not call xQueueSendToFront() or xQueueSendToBack() from an interrupt service routine. Use the interrupt-safe versions, xQueueSendToFrontFromISR() and xQueueSendToBackFromISR(), instead.
2.3 xQueueReceive():
BaseType_t xQueueReceive( QueueHandle_t xQueue, void * const pvBuffer, TickType_t xTicksToWait );
xQueueReceive() is used to receive (read) a message from a queue. The message that is received is removed from the queue.
| Parameter Name/ Returned value | Description |
|---|---|
| xQueue | The handle of the queue to which the data is being sent (written). The queue handle will have been returned from the call to xQueueCreate() used to create the queue. |
| pvBuffer | A pointer to the memory into which the received data will be copied. The size of each data item that the queue holds is set when the queue is created. The memory pointed to by pvBuffer must be at least large enough to hold that many bytes. |
| xTicksToWait | The maximum amount of time the task should remain in the Blocked state to wait for data to become available on the queue, should the queue already be empty. If xTicksToWait is zero, then xQueueReceive() will return immediately if the queue is already empty. The block time is specified in tick periods, so the absolute time it represents depends on the tick frequency. The macro pdMS_TO_TICKS() can be used to convert a time specified in milliseconds into ticks. Setting xTicksToWait to portMAX_DELAY will cause the task to wait indefinitely (without timing out), provided INCLUDE_vTaskSuspend is set to 1 in FreeRTOSConfig.h. |
| Return Value | There are two possible return values: 1. pdPASS Returned only if data was successfully read from the queue. If a block time was specified (xTicksToWait was not zero), then it is possible the calling task was placed into the Blocked state, to wait for data to become available on the queue, but data was successfully read from the queue before the block time expired. 2. errQUEUE_EMPTY Returned if data cannot be read from the queue because the queue is already empty. If a block time was specified (xTicksToWait was not zero,) then the calling task will have been placed into the Blocked state to wait for another task or interrupt to send data to the queue, but the block time expired before that happened. |
Note: Do not call xQueueReceive() from an interrupt service routine. Use the interrupt-safe xQueueReceiveFromISR() API function instead.
2.4 uxQueueMessagesWaiting():
UBaseType_t uxQueueMessagesWaiting( QueueHandle_t xQueue );
uxQueueMessagesWaiting() is used to query the number of items that are currently in a queue.
| Parameter Name | Description |
|---|---|
| xQueue | The handle of the queue being queried. The queue handle will have been returned from the call to xQueueCreate() used to create the queue. |
| Return Value | The number of items that the queue being queried is currently holding. If zero is returned, then the queue is empty. |
Note: Do not call uxQueueMessagesWaiting() from an interrupt service routine. Use the interrupt-safe uxQueueMessagesWaitingFromISR() instead.
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