RTLinux
| Original author(s) | Victor Yodaiken, Michael Barabanov |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | FSMLabs, Wind River Systems |
| Written in | C |
| Operating system | Linux |
| Available in | English |
| Type | Kernel |
| License | GPL2 |
| Website | www.rtlinux.org |
RTLinux is a hard realtime RTOS microkernel that runs the entire Linux operating system as a fully preemptive process. The hard real-time property makes it possible to control robots, data acquisition systems, manufacturing plants, and other time-sensitive instruments and machines from RTLinux applications. Even with a similar name it is not related the "Real-Time Linux" project of the Linux Foundation.
RTLinux was developed by Victor Yodaiken, Michael Barabanov, Cort Dougan and others at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology and then as a commercial product at FSMLabs. Wind River Systems acquired FSMLabs embedded technology in February 2007 and made a version available as Wind River Real-Time Core for Wind River Linux. As of August 2011, Wind River has discontinued the Wind River Real-Time Core product line, effectively ending commercial support for the RTLinux product.
The key RTLinux design objective was to add hard real-time capabilities to a commodity operating system to facilitate the development of complex control programs with both capabilities. For example, one might want to develop a real-time motor controller that used a commodity database and exported a web operator interface. Instead of attempting to build a single operating system that could support real-time and non-real-time capabilities, RTLinux was designed to share a computing device between a real-time and non-real-time operating system so that (1) the real-time operating system could never be blocked from execution by the non-real-time operating system and (2) components running in the two different environments could easily share data. As the name implies RTLinux was originally designed to use Linux as the non-real-time system but it eventually evolved so that the RTCore real-time kernel could run with either Linux or BSD UNIX.
Multi-Environment Real-Time (MERT) was the first example of a real-time operating system coexisting with a UNIX system. MERT relied on traditional virtualization techniques: the real-time kernel was the host operating system (or hypervisor) and Bell Systems UNIX was the guest. RTLinux was an attempt to update the MERT concept to the PC era and commodity hardware. It was also an attempt to also overcome the performance limits of MERT, particularly the overhead introduced by virtualization.
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