Orocos and RTAI/LXRT
Peter Soetens <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.science.robotics.orocos.user |
|---|---|
| Organization | KU Leuven |
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
Hi, The last half year, we have been porting Orocos to RTAI/LXRT. First, for people not knowing LXRT, I have made an LXRT porting howto, which is already a lot more on http://people.mech.kuleuven.ac.be/~psoetens/portingtolxrt.html We came to the conclusion that building extensive software frameworks in the linux kernel (with kernel-RTAI and kernel-RTLinux) are requiring to much maintenance and this environment does not support enough OS primitives or libraries. While developping the software for userspace was fast and easy, kernel development consumed a big part of our time budget. When we started to realize that RTAI allows truly integrated userspace realtime processes, supporting that platform became a high priority. So we ported Orocos also to LXRT. All our findings are described in the above howto. With this comprehensible howto, we hope to provide the future users a way to 'port' their device drivers to LXRT. When using Orocos software, the running threads will automatically be using LXRT, and can directly use the LXRT extensions. Does this mean we drop portability ? Certainly not ! Orocos still has an os-abstraction layer, and kernel-RTAI and kernel-RTLinux just fell out because of the 'incompleteness' they offer in their API. If you read the introduction to the howto, you might get a good impression of how good it is, and how much closer (or even further !) it brings linux to commercial realtime operating systems like VxWorks and the likes. with kind regards, Peter -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Peter Soetens http://www.orocos.org Katholieke Universiteit Leuven Division Production Engineering, tel. +32 16 322773 Machine Design and Automation fax. +32 16 322987 Celestijnenlaan 300B [email protected] B-3001 Leuven Belgium http://www.mech.kuleuven.ac.be/pma ------------------------------------------------------------------------