Wolfgang Denk submitted the following announcement regarding new RTAI and RTLinux support for smaller PowerPC processors . . .

On our FTP server you can find our first public release of patches that allow the use of the Linux Real-Time extensions RTAI (Real-Time Application Interface, Version RTAI-24.1.4) and RTLinux (Version RTLinux-3.0) on the Embedded PowerPC Controllers of the Motorola MPC8xx family. The patches are running and have been tested with the Linux version 2.4.4 kernel, which is available on the same FTP server.
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Rationale: Both real-time extensions of the Linux kernel (RTAI and RTLinux) have been running on the PowerPC architecture for some time. But so far they only supported the “bigger” CPU's. They did not run on Embedded Controllers like the Motorola PowerQICC CPUs, which are very attractive for embedded systems since they integrate a lot of peripheral functions which allows for very small systems like the half-credit-card sized TQM8xxL mini-modules. With our patches you can run Linux applications with hard real-time requirements on such small systems.

There are also several new features in our version of the Linux 2.4.4 kernel, like a framebuffer driver to control LCD displays on a MPC823 processor, or a new version of the MPC8xx UART driver that supports hardware flow control on all 4 SCC ports.

The support is available as follows . . .

• Linux 2.4.4 kernel source is available here

• patch for RTAI-24.1.4 is available here; see the included file “README.DENX” for additional information.

• patch for RTLinux-3.0 is available here; see the included file “README.DENX” for additional information.

• information about the hardware used for the tests is available here

Disclaimer: This is the first public release, so it's still beta in some areas. Please see the included files “README.DENX” for known problems and limitations.

For additional information please contact: [email protected]

Best regards,
Wolfgang Denk

 
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