[ Thanks to Jennifer
Finlinson for this announcement: ]
Real-Time Application Interface (RTAI) Now Supports PPC and 2.4
Kernel
New PPC and 2.4 Kernel Support Added to Real-Time Application
Interface for Linux
Technical Bulletin July 20, 2000
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. 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.
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.
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
–
allowing you to, for instance,
create one real-time task from another.
** PERL Bindings
–
allowing simplified soft real-time programming
from a scripting environment.
** /proc interface
–
providing detailed information on the
scheduler, FIFOs, interrupts, and memory manager.
** LXRT
–
allowing the 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 http://www.rtai.org.
Information on the earlier RTAI (v 0.7) can be found at http://www.lineoisg.com/news/012.html.