Socorro, NM — (press release excerpt) — FSMLabs Inc. today announced the immediate availabity of user-mode hard real-time capability for the RTLinux/Pro hard real-time operating system.

The Process Space Development Domain (PSDD) component allows RTLinux real-time threads to be created within a user-mode protected address space. PSDD is available for Intel, AMD processors, and PowerPC, It is supported on both multiprocessor and uniprocessor systems. PSDD is intended for both prototyping and for large scale real-time systems including those where some untrusted code needs to be executed. PSDD comes with a 'frame scheduler' that optimizes use of large numbers of threads. Michael Barabanov, FSMLabs chief architect for the PSDD project says “PSDD is especially well suited to large scale simulation and test applications.”

Dean Anneser, a Software Engineering Fellow at Pratt & Whitney says “This provides a very cost effective scalable multiplatform solution (x86/ppc) for our simulation, control, and data acquisition systems. This toolset will be used extensively with software developed by Pratt & Whitney and Hamilton Sundstrand for the development and testing of electronic engine controls and control of engine test facilities. PSDD with RTLinux provides the two capabilities essential for our application — usermode frame based scheduling across multiple CPUs, and the ability of one process to easily read/write user variables in another process.”

RTLinux/PSDD follows the POSIX threads API used in RTLinux. User processes running under the general purpose operating system register with the FSMLabs RTCore
real-time kernel and requests permission to create real-time threads. When this permission is granted, a subset of the real-time threads API is activated and the process is passed from the general purpose operating system to the RTCore kernel. At this point real-time threads in the process are scheduled and executed under RTCore control, but within the address space of the process. PSDD is completely integrated into the RTLinux debugger, memory faults can either automatically activate the debugger or cause the process to be terminated. If desired, once PSSD threads have been validated, they can be recompiled and run in RTCore address space with no code changes. While the basic RTLinux scheduler is optimized for small numbers of threads, the user space frame scheduler that comes with PSDD scales well to bigger systems.

 
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