The development team has perfected and added much functionality to RTAI over the course of the last year. The presentation will review this progress and focus on the following areas

• Improvements in the source tree, installation procedure and manual upgrade.
  
• Dynamic CPU frequency and bus frequency calibration.
  
• Port to Linux 2.4: 24.1.x releases and the PPC architecture.
  
• New Fifos: dynamic creation of named fifos, signal and semaphore interfaces.
  
• POSIX 1003.1c thread module with mutexes and condition variables.
  
• RT_MEM_MGR module: Dynamic memory management and C++ support.
  
• LXRT: soft and hard real time modes in user space with symmetrical API.
  
• Trap handling and memory protection while in plain RT and LXRT modes.
  
• LXRT-INFORMED: integration of RTAI, trap handlers and Linux at termination.
  
• RT_LXRT_COM and RT_LXRT_RNET modules: the concept of an extendable LXRT.
  
• MINI_LXRT: timers and tasklets running in user space.
  
• Integration of QNX IPC primitives, proxy messages and qBlk's to LXRT module.
  
• LIBLXRT: efforts to simplify the API for GUI and C++ programmers.
  
• LINUX_SERVER: access to Linux I/O while in LXRT hard real time mode.
  
• Linux Trace Tool Kit: support for RTAI including LXRT.

The LXRT module with its fully symmetrical API provides a safe and flexible tool to quickly implement hard real time programs in user space. Once the program is debugged, it can be easily migrated to the kernel for optimal performance if the application demands it. With CPU clocked near the 1 GHz mark the necessity to execute code in the kernel becomes questionable. Thus, LXRT provides the trust direction of RTAI's future developments.

Download paper (862K PDF)

 
This article was originally published on LinuxDevices.com and has been donated to the open source community by QuinStreet Inc. Please visit LinuxToday.com for up-to-date news and articles about Linux and open source.