Chapter 9. RTAI

Table of Contents
Architecture overview
Hardware characteristics
Process management
Memory management
Inter-Process communication
Time and timers
Driver programming
Quality of Service
Network
Filesystems
Trace and debug
Miscelanea

Architecture overview

The basic structure of RTAI is the same than RTLinux. A new software layer is beneath Linux kernel with full control of interrupts and processor key features.

RTAI scheduler treats the Linux operating system kernel as the idle task. Linux only executes when there are no real time tasks to run, and the real time kernel is inactive. The Linux task can never block interrupts or prevent itself from being preempted.