A simpler migration path from traditional RTOS to GNU/Linux can favour a wider acceptance of the latter as a real-time embedded platform. Providing emulators to mimic the traditional RTOS APIs is one of the initiative the free software community can take to fill the gap between the very fragmented traditional RTOS world and the GNU/Linux world, in order for the application designers relying on traditional RTOS to move as smoothly as possible to the GNU/
There is a lack of common software framework for developing these emulators, whereas the behavioural similarities between the traditional RTOS are obvious.
The Xenomai technology aims at fulfilling this gap, by providing a consistent architecture-neutral and generic emulation layer taking advantage of these similarities. It is also committed to provide an increasing set of traditional RTOS emulators built on top of this layer.
Xenomai relies on the common features and behaviours found between many embedded traditional RTOS, especially from the thread scheduling and synchronization standpoints. These similarities are exploited to implement a nucleus exporting a set of generic services. These services grouped in a high-level interface can be used in turn to implement emulation modules of real-time application programming interfaces, which mimic the corresponding real-time kernel APIs.
A similar approach was used for the CarbonKernel project [1] in the simulation field, in which RTOS simulation models are built on top of a generic virtual RTOS based on event-driven techniques.
© 2004 RTAI Project