The Raspberry Pi Pico, and RP2040, Get Full Dual-Core SMP Support in Apache's NuttX RTOS Port
Initial single-core port of the real-time operating system gets supercharged with symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) support.
Apache's NuttX, a real-time operating system (RTOS) designed for embedded systems, has received initial support for the Raspberry Pi Pico and other boards based on the same RP2040 microcontroller.
Launched late last month, the Raspberry Pi Pico and its RP2040 microcontroller have become popular targets for software ports: Launching with a C/C++ SDK, MicroPython, and CircuitPython support, the microcontroller has since seen plans for ports, or functional ports, of the Arduino IDE, RT-Thread, FuzixOS, and more.
Now there's a new entry to add to the list: Apache's POSIX-standard real-time operating system NuttX, which has been ported to the RP2040 with full support for symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) operation across its two Arm Cortex-M0+ cores.
A pull request submitted to the project yesterday and merged late last night builds on earlier work to offer single-core support on RP2040 boards by adding full symmetric multiprocessing capabilities. As a result, it's now possible for NuttX to exploit the full capabilities of the RP2040 microcontroller's dual-core processor.
The pull request is available on the Apache NuttX GitHub repository, and has been merged into the main branch ready for interested parties to download and try themselves. More information on NuttX itself can be found on the official website.