Which FreeRTOS kernel settings appear under Component config → FreeRTOS → Kernel in menuconfig, and what do the tick rate, "run only on first core" and stack-overflow checking control?
The tick rate (configTICK_RATE_HZ, 100 Hz) sets how often the scheduler's timer interrupt fires; "run FreeRTOS only on first core" builds a single-core kernel instead of using both ESP32 cores; stack-overflow checking (method 2, canary bytes) detects a task that wrote past the end of its stack.
- Tick rate, 100 Hz. The tick is a periodic timer interrupt. On each one the kernel counts time, wakes tasks whose delay has run out and, if time slicing is on, switches between tasks of equal priority. At 100 Hz one tick is 10 ms, which is the resolution of
vTaskDelay. A faster tick gives finer timing but spends more CPU time and energy in the interrupt. - Run FreeRTOS only on first core (
CONFIG_FREERTOS_UNICORE). The ESP32 has two Xtensa cores, and ESP-IDF's FreeRTOS normally schedules tasks across both. With this option the kernel runs on core 0 only and behaves like standard single-core FreeRTOS. It makes scheduling easier to reason about, at the cost of half the compute. - Stack-overflow check, method 2. Each task's stack is filled with a known byte pattern (the canary) at its far end. On every context switch the kernel checks the last bytes are untouched; if not, the task has overflowed and the system reports it instead of silently corrupting memory.
The same screen also shows the idle task's stack size, the maximum task-name length, and whether software timers are enabled, each one a config… constant of the kernel. Another option replaces ESP-IDF's FreeRTOS with Amazon's SMP kernel and is marked experimental.
Go deeper:
ESP-IDF — FreeRTOS (IDF) — dual-core scheduling, the single-core option and how IDF FreeRTOS differs from vanilla.
FreeRTOS — Task scheduling — the tick, time slicing and preemption in the reference kernel.
Wikipedia — Stack overflow — what happens when a call stack runs past its bound, and why small embedded stacks hit it easily.