I would use the armstonea8 board for real time purposes with xenomai realtime system. However the xenomai v2.6.1 arm-patch is available for a linux kernel v3.0.36. Is there a possibility from your side to provide a kind of armstonea8 specific patch for different kernel compilations?
Real Time
-
-
Unfortunately no. We are using kernel 3.3 because earlier kernels don't provide the features that are required for the SoC used on the armStoneA8 (Samsung S5PV210). And we will be further moving towards newer kernels rather soon, to have the best possible support for device trees. So if Xenomai is still at 3.0 kernel, the gap is quite too large to do a "patch" in just a few days. Real-time is a rather tricky thing and it requires a deep knowledge of the interaction between the Linux kernel itself and the Xenomai RTOS infrastructure. If it would be that easy to switch to newer kernel versions, believe me, Xenomai would be there already. But as far as I see even the x86-branch is still at kernel 3.2.
So I see no way how we could lift Xenomai to kernel 3.3 or even newer. And going the opposite way of back-porting our Linux stuff to kernel 3.0 is no option for us.
What we most probably will do in the future is some support for the RT_Preempt patch. When upgrading to newer kernels, we might deliberately stop at a version that is supported by the RT_Preempt patch. That would be 3.6 at the moment, but this may change until we get there. Then it would be possible to apply this real-time patch to our kernel. But for other real-time combinations like Xenomai, RT-Linux or RTAI, we don't see a chance to get them running if they are not at the same up-to-date kernel level as our releases.
But if you are interested in real-time usage, please wait for the Embedded World Exhibition in Nürnberg at the beginning of March 2013. There we will present a new armStone board specifically targeted for real-time applications. But it will use a completely different approach by adding a Cortex M4 companion chip. More information about this board will be available in the middle of January on our homepage.
Your F&S Support Team
-
Hello. Since Xenomai v2.6.2 which was recently released, it's now possible to patch kernel v3.4.6. is ther any change to get xenomai working.
-
Have you checked our newly announced armStoneA5 already? This board uses the Freescale Vybrid processor, which combines a Cortex A5 CPU for the main application (e.g. under Linux) and a Cortex-M4 CPU for real-time purposes under the real-time OS MQX. Maybe this is a better solution for your real-time needs than Xenomai?
Your F&S Support Team
