Here is an announcement from Paolo Mantegazza of the RTAI project . . .

The RTAI project is pleased to announce the 24.1.10 release of the famous real-time extension to the Linux kernel.

It is a huge one, worth a couple of releases before it. There are so many new things that I'm not sure to recall them all. More or less and without caring of any order of presentation what's new should be:

• NEWLXRT, i.e. LXRT without using RTAI proper tasks. It schedules just LINUX tasks and kernel threads natively. Under NEWLXRT kernel space threads works in hard mode always, user space Linux tasks can be soft/hard as in LXRT. You can think of it as something that makes Linux a hard real time kernel natively, albeit under the constraint of using RTAI APIs. Anything that runs under RTAI can run under NEWLXRT (kernel/user space). Back portable down to rtai-24.1.7 by just copying the related directory.
• Full support for writing interrupt handlers in user space under LXRT/NEWLXRT (UserSpaceInterrups-USI).
• Support for COMEDI kernel space APIs (kcomedilib) in user space under LXRT/NEWLXRT, in soft/hard real time. (The Comedi Players)
• Support for LABVIEW under LXRT/NEWLXRT, in soft/hard real time. It is now possible to program your hard real time applications, including interrupt handlers, using the visual 'G' language. (Thomas Leibner)
• LXRT extensions can now use the FPU. (Giuseppe Renoldi)
• A new real time support for serial ports, user/kernel space (SPDRV). (Giuseppe Renoldi)
• Support for making it easy for you to prepare a bootable floppy that runs RTAI (uRTAI, read it microRTAI). (Lorenzo Dozio)
• RTW should work more reliably and has more DAQ boards supported, including NI-MIO line. (Lorenzo Dozio)
• Revised and more detailed configuration for a better making. (Lorenzo Dozio, with help and suggestions from the RTAI team)

It is also possible to apply a new patch (allsoft) that allows configuring RTAI to manage all interrupts (hard/soft), in the soft way (ALLSOFT) and avoid scheduling any RTAI proper tasks from Linux (MINI_LXRT). The new configuration making will assist you in setting up such features, if you use the “allsoft” patch.

It is distributed as a short living provisional work.

In fact ALLSOFT+MINI_LXRT is meant to pave the way to the ADEOS transition by statically mimicking its multi-domain scheme in replacement of the previous master(RTAI)-slave(Linux) approach. It is intended to provide the bottom line in terms of performance that we should be able to reach, hopefully improve, with ADEOS, so people can immediately experiment the implications of the future transition to ADEOS. Such a transition will be the core of rtai-24.1.11.

I'll not dwell on the meaning of having ALLSOFT+MINI_LXRT and NEWLXRT (back portable), RTAI users should grasp it easily.

 
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