From Xenomai

Project History

• August 2001 First public release of the Xenodaptor project, soon renamed Xenomai, as an independent effort to create a real-time framework for facilitating migrations from proprietary RTOS to Linux.

• March 2002 Xenomai 1.0 milestone is reached. The RTOS emulation core can be plugged onto RTAI's RTHAL/x86 component in kernel space, or directly over the (now legacy) LinuxThreads interface for user-space execution, depending on the real-time requirements.

• July 2002 Xenomai is ported over Adeos. This removes dependencies on any existing real-time Linux variant, particularly for gaining predictable interrupt latencies.

• December 2002 Xenomai 1.1.1, final release of the 1.x series.

• January 2003 Xenomai joins forces with the RTAI project, first to port RTAI over Adeos, then in helping in reorganizing and maintaining the RTAI code base, and eventually to port RTAI to Linux 2.6. At that point, RTAI becomes an umbrella project hosting both the classic RTAI implementation, and the Xenomai code base.

• April 2004 Start of a Xenomai-specific development branch based on the 1.x series as a standalone component of the RTAI project, known as "fusion", to resume active work on the Xenomai code base. Xenomai gains hard real-time support in user-space, a path RTAI/LXRT pioneered back in 1999. A few key decisions are made:
  • the standard Linux programming model will be kept available to applications as much as possible, even when running on top of a dual-kernel system. This implies that applications must be allowed to run in user-space seamlessly, with real-time guarantees, for all CPU architectures Xenomai supports.
  • Xenomai will be easily portable to various CPU architectures and platforms.
  • Xenomai is about providing real-time interfaces, not imposing a particular real-time Linux core technology, such as Adeos-based dual kernel or PREEMPT_RT. Dual kernel and native Linux preemption systems can serve different application profiles and requirements. At some point, Xenomai should leverage both and blur the boundaries between them for real-time applications, to ease migrations.

• August 2004 Port to the powerpc architecture.

• May 2005 Port to the ia64 architecture.

• July 2005 Port to the powerpc64 architecture.

• July 2005 The Real-Time Driver Model (RTDM) is merged.

• October 2005 Xenomai leaves the RTAI project to become independent again. Xenomai 2.0 is rolled out, based on the final "fusion" release (0.9.1).

• November 2005 Port to the Blackfin architecture.

• January 2006 Port to the ARM architecture.

• October 2006 The Real-Time CAN stack is merged.

• February 2007 Port to the x86_64 architecture.

• March 2008 Xenomai/SOLO, a PREEMPT_RT-based incarnation of our RTOS emulation core is released.

• June 2008 The Comedi over RTDM framework is merged.

• August 2008 Xenomai is covered by the 2nd edition of O'Reilly's guide to "Building Embedded Linux Systems".

• May 2009 Xenomai 2.4.8 is released.