Herndon, Virginia — (press release) — The Real Time Application Interface (RTAI) development team led by Paolo Mantegazza of Dipartimento di Ingegneria Aerospaziale Politecnico di Milano (DIAPM), today announced the release of RTAI, version 1.3. In the open source spirit, this new version provides enhanced capabilities and services which simultaneously extend the ability of RTAI to meet the needs of… complex real-time applications and make it easier for developers to write and debug those applications. RTAI is available under the Free Software Foundation's LGPL open source license.

RTAI now includes dynamic memory allocation, a /proc interface, an enhanced LXRT-Informed (LinuX RT) module, and PERL bindings for soft real-time task development.

Dynamic Memory Allocation added

The dynamic memory allocation development was led by Steve Papacharalambous of Zentropix, which was recently acquired by Lineo, Inc, a leading developer of embedded Linux system software. Now real-time applications running under RTAI are able to dynamically allocate and free memory from a pool using the management module's standard API. Previously, dynamic memory allocation has not been possible in any of the real-time Linux kernels, including RTAI and RTLinux, and calls to allocate and free memory from real-time tasks had to be avoided. Thus real-time applications were required to allocate memory usage before entering real time.

/proc Interface Development

The new “/proc” interface development, led by Papacharalambous of Zentropix, shows the current status for critical elements of the real-time services and features. With this interface, users can access information on the state of the application and RTAI real-time service kernel modules, including the scheduler, FIFOs, interrupts, and memory manager.

LXRT-Informed: real-time operations from user space

Development of the LXRT-Informed module, led by Pierre Cloutier of Poseidon Controls, Inc., provides enhanced real-time operations from standard user space. LXRT is an important feature because it allows the user to develop a real-time task under the memory protection of Linux by allowing the use of RTAI's API from standard user space. Additionally, LXRT allows dynamic switching of tasks between the hard/soft real-time modes from within an application. In an effort to facilitate code development, enhancements have also been added to ensure that the system recovers gracefully after the crash of a Linux task with a real-time LXRT component.

PERL bindings simplify real-time programming

The PERL bindings development, led by Stuart Hughes also of Zentropix, gives developers the ability to program in a soft real-time environment from the PERL scripting language. This feature allows Linux developers to use the intuitive and familiar PERL scripting language to create, destroy and schedule real-time tasks which run using the RTAI API within user space as soft real-time tasks. It also provides the ability to learn the basics of real-time programming without the need to become intimate with the programming languages or compilers.

Today's RTAI v 1.3 provides a competitive and quickly growing list of features including:

• POSIX 1003.1.c compatibility
  
• Traditional RTOS IPCs including: Semaphores, mailboxes, mutexes, condition variables, FIFOs, shared memory and RPCs
  
• Dynamic Memory Allocation
  
• PERL Bindings
  
• /proc interface
  
• LXRT
  
• UniProcessor and SMP support
  
• FPU support
  
• One-shot and periodic schedulers

The availability of RTAI's services and features, with debug and development tools, combine to provide what many believe to be the foremost implementation of real-time Linux. Further information on RTAI (v 0.7) can be found in the April issue of Linux Journal or online, here.

About Real-time Linux (www.realtimelinux.org)

This site provides a comprehensive resource for information, discussion, links, documentation, example source code, and all things real-time under Linux.

About RTAI (www.rtai.org)

Conceived in 1996 at the DIAPM in Milano, Italy, the Linux Real-Time Application Interface (RTAI) provides a preemptive and deterministic hard real-time environment for Linux. RTAI is licensed under the LGPL and can be downloaded from www.rtai.org.

About Poseidon Controls Inc. (www.poseidoncontrols.com)

Founded in 1984, the company focuses on developing NPCS, a QNX 2 real-time process control and SCADA software package. Poseidon Controls are system integrators specialized in applications that require complex communications system design.

About Zentropix (www.zentropix.com)

Founded in August, 1997, Zentropix focuses on RealTime Linux and has offices in the US and UK. By providing a validated and configuration managed version of RealTime Linux and Zentropix' development tools, combined with support, custom engineering, and training, Zentropix meets the needs of software developers and corporations, who are now developing embedded and real-time applications. In February 2000, Zentropix was acquired by Lineo, Inc., an embedded Linux system software developer headquartered in Lindon, Utah.

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Related stories:
DIAPM-RTAI: Real-time Linux API (link)
RTAI: Real-Time Application Interface (article)
History, Motivations, and Overview of RTAI (article)
Perl bindings simplify real-time Linux API (news)

 
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