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Announcement - Agenda - Paper Presentations

RTLinux-GPL is a RTOS which uses a dual-kernel approach, that is, executing a real-time kernel (RTLinux-GPL itself) jointly with a general purpose OS (Linux). By using this approach, complex real-time application with both, hard and soft real-time requirements can be implemented easier.

However, after several years of applying patches, the core of RTLinux is getting bloated and hard to maintain, with several out-of-date and not-working features. This fact forced us to consider either to _reengage_ its code or to start a new kernel from scratch to replace it.

Although the first option seems to be more suitable, since RTLinux is a mature and stable code, important design flaws (specifically, problems when a RTLinux application deals with signals and system calls) has headed us towards the second one.

In this paper we present this new core, called PaRTiKle. PaRTiKle was designed keeping in mind the following premises: be as portable and easily maintainable as possible. PaRTiKle implements POSIX PSE.51 (Minimal Real-time System Profile). Besides, this kernel also includes support for several of the most important RTLinux's non-POSIX features.

Unlike RTLinux, PaRTiKle has been designed to be run under different execution environments. So far, it is possible to execute PaRTiKle up to three different execution environments: a bare machine, as a linux standard process and as a XtratuM's domain. Where the latest alternative gives the ability to develop RT systems with mixed requirements (hard/soft real-time).

Although PaRTiKle has been completely written in C and Assembly, it also supports the following languages' run-times: C++, Ada and Java (GCJ, currently out-of-date).