I am currently in the process of developing the OS for a consumer electronics product my company is developing. I have settled on freeRTOS as the backbone for our OS, and am working diligently to implement hardware functionality within the OS. However, I have run into an issue concerning running 3rd-party applications from within freeRTOS.
Originally I considered a task to be an application, where basically you had "myapplication.c" and "myapplication.h" containing all your applications necessary functions and the code would reside within the for(;;) loop within the task (acting as a main while loop). Then when the user decides to run that application, a function pointer is passed to a queue, that my app_launcher task then uses to create the new task using the 3rd-party task or application.
The problem with this approach however, is the OS will already be compiled and reside on the microcontroller, and applications with be installed and deleted as the user sees fit... So obviously applications need to be compiled and executable from the OS. On a standard unix machine, I would use something like fork, to select the executable and give it it's own process. However I cannot find a similar functionality within freeRTOS.. My other idea is approaching a scripting language for app development, but again I'm not sure on how to launch those applications...
So the question is, how do I get freeRTOS to run applications from 3rd party developers that aren't already baked into the OS?