RT-Control questions

[Herman Bruyninckx]

On Wed, 7 Aug 2002, Dominic wrote:

> What is the fastest way to acquire data, process it and
> output the computed data? (realized as a realtime task)

Doing everything in an interrupt routine, I guess. But this has
consequences on the rest of the system, because the ISR runs with
interrupts disabled.
The combination of an ISR (interrupts off) with a DSR (tasklet, task;
running with interrupts enabled) is the classical solution.

> P.S. I was not allowed to use RTAI, because of the legacy-code used by our
>      department, which is based on RTLINUX.
>      Is RTLINUX still in development? 

Yes. But mostly in closed source way. Most of the community efforts
have moved to RTAI, because that is a real open source project.

>      Are new versions only available for paying customers?
No, from time to time fsmlabs releases a new GPL version.

>      Are there good reasons to use RTLINUX for new projects or
>      wouldn't it be better for our department to port the yet small
>      code amount to RTAI.

That's up to you to decide :-) The community feedback from RTAI is an
order of magnitude larger than with RTLinux, but that doesn't say
everything :-)

Herman

-- 
  K.U.Leuven, Mechanical Engineering, Robotics Research Group
<http://people.mech.kuleuven.ac.be/~bruyninc> Tel: +32 16 322480