Lindon, UT — (press release) — The Real Time Application Interface (RTAI) development team led by Paolo Mantegazza of Dipartimento di Ingegneria Aerospaziale Politecnico di Milano (DIAPM) has announced the beta release of RTAI version 24.1.0. The most notable items of this new version are its support for the PowerPC (PPC) architecture and for the Linux 2.4 kernel. Additionally, the file structure has been optimized in order to make porting to different architectures a simpler matter.

RTAI's rich set of core services, combined with its many features and the development tools developed and funded largely by Lineo's Industrial Solutions Group (formerly Zentropix) provide what many believe to be the foremost real-time Linux development and deployment solution.

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

• Traditional RTOS IPCs — Semaphores, mailboxes, mutexes, condition variables, FIFOs, shared memory, and RPCs
  
• UniProcessor and SMP (x86) support
  
• FPU support
  
• One-shot and periodic schedulers
  
• x86 family CPU support
  
• Motorola PowerPC CPU support
  
• Linux kernel 2.4 support

RTAI distinguishes itself from other real-time Linux solutions by providing:

• POSIX 1003.1c compatibility — allows programming from a common, fully portable API
  
• Dynamic Memory Allocation — allows creating one real-time task from another.
  
• PERL Bindings — allows creating simplified soft real-time programming from a scripting environment.
  
• /proc interface — provides detailed information on the scheduler, FIFOs, interrupts, and memory manager.
  
• LXRT — allows development and deployment of hard real-time applications within standard user space.

RTAI is licensed under the LGPL. Full details regarding the status and changes in this new version of RTAI as well as the download can be found at: www.rtai.org. Information on the earlier version of RTAI (v 0.7) can be found here.

Related stories:
RTAI releases real-time Linux add-on for kernel 2.4.xx
DIAPM-RTAI: Real-time Linux API
RTAI: Real-Time Application Interface
DIAPM-RTAI Hard Real Time Support for Linux

 
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