The RTAI Environment

This chapter explores the real-time application interface (RTAI) environment running on the workstation. RTAI can be tried on the target by going to the RTAI download page and finding a version that supports the 2.6.0 kernel. RTAI has a extensive set of application programming interfaces (APIs). The chapter focuses on some examples of APIs. It explains the installation procedure of RTAI. It also describes how to configure and build RTAI. RTAI includes an extensive set of mechanisms to facilitate communication and synchronization among kernel space tasks. These include semaphores, mailboxes, and messaging. These communication and synchronization mechanisms apply only to kernel space real-time tasks. RTAI also supports two mechanisms to provide communication between a real-time task and a user space Linux process: RT first-in-first-out (FIFOs) and shared memory. The chapter discusses real-time in user space, that is LXRT. LXRT allows to run real-time tasks in user space using the same API that is provided in Kernel Space RTAI.