AM6442: Will TI support Zephyr RTOS on R5F for AM64x?

Hi Rich:

 Although I am not a present TIer (I was one back in 1997), I know there is some serious consideration for Zephyr as an alternative to FreeRTOS on (at least) the R5 and M4 cores within the AM6442 line (can't claim exactly for the A53 cores) based on a chat with one of the TI Dallas based Sitara marketing people recently.  

 TI's Bengaluru India team is seriously looking at Zephyr; see https://www.linkedin.com/posts/khasim-syed-mohammed-24bb643_zephyr-meetup-may-2025-ti-bangalore-ugcPost-7329880872269107201-AKOl   where they hosted a Zephyr meetup.

Thanks for the link that you posted ; I saw  zephyr/boards/ti/sk_am64/doc/index.rst at main · zephyrproject-rtos/zephyr · GitHub   - very interesting.

I know one of the TI AM64x SOM suppliers has been working on an Alpha version of a Zephyr sub-BSP (I cannot disclose who they are given an NDA).

regards

Jim

Jim, 

Thanks for your information sharing. 

Yes, khasim-syed-mohammed is now leading software team for both MPU and MCU and we know Zephyr is under evaluating to support. 

Customer would like to learn TI plan on this and the feasibility on AM64x now. 

Wait for development team to comment on these.

BR, Rich

Hello Rich,

Can you please share what the end customer use case is ?

Why does the customer want to go with Zephyr rather than FreeRTOS ?

Regards,

Anil.

Anil, 

This customer is for IPC and they do networking gateway and IO device. 

I suggest using Free RTOS since it is official supported and all the IPC framework is there already. 

The reason they want to go with Zephyr could be they use Zephyr on other platform and familiar with Zephyr.

No sure whether there is other specific feature or reason from customer. 

Could you answer the first question and we can have further discuss on question 2? 

BR, Rich 

Hello Rich,

The IPC is already supported on the Zephyr AM243X devices.

So, the same code is used for AM64X as well, because the AM64X and AM243X devices are the same except the A53 cores.

Right now, the IPC is supported on the R5F0_0 and if the customer wants to use it on the other R5F cores, they need to modify the kconfig..

https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/zephyr/blob/main/soc/ti/k3/am6x/r5/arm_mpu_regions.c

https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/zephyr/blob/main/soc/ti/k3/Kconfig.soc

Regards,

Anil.

Anil, 

Is this Github maintained by Zephyr? 

From the github you point, Zephyr runs on AM64x/AM24x R5 is supported. 

I know team is evaluating Zephyr support seriously for our portfolio. 

Does TI have plan for official release with Zephyr other than Free RTOS? 

BR, Rich

No official SDK planned at the moment . The github releases are being done to enable customers who want to do their own development based on this port and the features we enabled is all we are planning to enable, no additional features beyond what you currently see.