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. (more…)

The “less is more” approach to Embedded Linux toolkits

Making use of the standard Linux installation and development procedures is not necessarily a bad thing, and this suggests the second general approach to Embedded Linux toolkits. The standard Linux workflow is not unusable — it just has chaotic documentation, and could use some utilities oriented toward deploying Linux in embedded… (more…)

Development Process

The development process is essentially that of Linux, with the addition of some useful utilities. (more…)

Other observations

Notably absent from BlueCat is a tool for selecting packages to be included in the target root file system. The competing toolkits all have ways to specify what components are to be included, though with varying features and usefulness. Although this would seem to be a serious deficiency, BlueCat's lack of this type of tool is mitigated somewhat by the large number of… (more…)

Articles and whitepapers about Embedded Linux and the Embedded Linux Market (more…)

Configuring the system

Having set up the project, we then move to configuring the system. To do so you run the main program of the ELDS user interface, improbably named “pconf3.py”. This program could serve as a textbook case on how not to design user interfaces. (more…)

Building target images for three SBCs

Despite the GUI and documentation provided with ELDS, I did manage to configure and build kernels and root filesystems for the three single-board computers I'm using as test platforms for this series of reviews. The SBCs — an Ampro Little Board/P5x, a… (more…)

Overall assessment

I'm not sure what to make of Red Hat's strategy in releasing the Embedded Linux Developer Suite at this time. It has an unfinished feel, obvious to even the most casual user. The user interface reminds me of some quick-and-dirty GUIs I've written myself to meet temporary internal needs, rather than a professional user interface intended for customers. (more…)

POSIX is a set of international standards whose main goal is to support applications portability at the source code level. It defines an operating system interface and environment based on the UNIX operating system. A series of POSIX Real-Time standards have been defined to support real-time applications portability. (more…)

A real-time virtual resource is an abstraction for resource sharing where the application task groups sharing a resource must meet timing constraints in the absence of knowledge of all the timing requirements of all the task groups, thus prohibiting a global schedulability analysis. (more…)

We present a methodology to perform fine-grained cycle-accurate timing measurements crossing the user-kernel boundary. Special attention is payed not to deteriorate the results by the measurement process itself. Next, we apply our methodology to obtain execution timing for the system entry and exit paths on x86-based Linux systems. (more…)

The purpose of benchmarking systems is most commonly to alow judgment if a system configuration is suitable for a given RT-spec. Aside from the fact that these RT-specs are most often quite vague, the problem of benchmarking is not well resolved in the currently available hard real-time solutions for Linux. (more…)

Intelligent robots are capable of handling complex tasks that includes recognition of vocal commands, logical inference, autonomous navigation and manipulation, etc. To accomplish intelligent behaviors, researchers have proposed a number of control software architectures such as tripodal schematic control architecture (TSCA). (more…)

Researchers, developers and system integrators require more openness in control systems in order to design, develop and rapidly integrate functionalities to fulfill new application requirements. Even if several robot control vendors provide their products with customized development tools, low cost and not proprietary solutions should be preferred to face the rapid market changes and to reduce control life… (more…)

Currently can combination of Linux and RTAI be run on various platforms. Yet the decision to choose one of them relies on many factors of which the stability of the microprocessor in various conditions is one but not the last of them, obviously. In this paper we want to present the development project where at start the combination Intel StrongARM/Linux/RTAI seemed very reliable and promising, at least by… (more…)