Hi to Peter and you all,
BTW Peter I can hear you is just that I'm moving around here for some
meetings and could not answer before.
I read all the mails sent up to now. I like the idea of the meeting but,
as someone else, I have funding problems. But if there will be one,
Vienna is a nice place not far away, I'll try to be there.
However I'm lazy and I like someone's else idea of an e-meeting, which I
assume is a long session of mails to the RTL mailing list.
>From most of the mails I see that the crucial point is that many would
like to see a rejoining of DIAPM_RTAI with NMT_RTL.
That what I always wanted, if it was for me there would never had been a
split. You all should remember that I posted the idea of a common effort
about the RTHAL_RTAI basic layer to this list from the very beginning,
but it was refused by Victor and company, and many others thought of it
has a way of organizing some directories tree.
Forgive me if I'll start the meeting now, but it is time to sum up a few
points.
1) Why I made that proposal? Because I saw that 2.2.xx was naturally
getting to the HAL concept, not exactly as I liked it but closely.
Victor is right in telling that 2.3.xx is going even better, but there
is still something lacking to make things easier. However the idea is
likely to survive against future kernel releases.
2) Why did we decided to go by ourselves? Because we were in the hurry
of proving that a certain system could be controlled with a $1000 DUAL
350 PII, in place of an about $100.000 dedicated system, and SMP RTL did
not existed yet and we could not wait.
3) Thank to what said in 1) we thought that we could do it and in one
month we proved that it worked. What we had available by that time was
the proof that the idea worked and the first pieces of a HAL, our very
tiny patch to the kernel, and RTAI, the module that could allow to do
(almost) all you wanted without touching the kernel.
4) At that point we could stop and wait for RTL, but we decided to see
what the idea was worth. What we, a single non specialist programmer and
a couple of testers, did is now RTAI-0.6 and prove that the idea is
sound, and as effective as any other approach at least. In fact take
into account that if you look at RTL-betaxx patch and RTAI you see that
they are very similar. It could not be different as both come from the
very same family, i.e. RTL, and our variant to it, for 2.0.xx. It should
be recalled that I pointed out a couple of bugs of RTL I verified in
advance with RTAI. We still have hopes of RTL people helping us in
finding bugs while cross checking with RTAI.
5) What does rejoin mean? For us the adoption of the HAL_RTAI idea in
clear, with all the wheres and whys neatly explained to all of us, so
that everybody can be confident in what is using. Open software should
primarely be open knowledge.
Why not a patch? Because it does not isolate problems. I think that
Linux should never go real time natively but have a HAL that allows it
to completly surrender to a real time application interface. We must not
bother of the kernel, but with an RTAI module get in full control of
both the kernel and the machine:
!!! THESE ARE THE ONLY TWO THINGS THAT MUST BE IN COMMON !!!
Clearly such an RTAI module should contain a lot of short and simple
basic services and, being of vital importance, arbitrated by the
community of users and developers appropriately. In this view I'm still
hoping that someone else comes out with a better than ours RTAI.
6) That provided everybody can unleash is fantasy and use what exists
already, add modules completely anew, by copying partly or in total,
etc. etc... I think that on such a base many of you are of the kind
"better do it by myself than look at the DOCs".
7) People that are going to make a choice should be aware that in the
long run it will depend on what "GODFATHER LINUS TORVALDS" will decide
in relation to the kernel. Should he go the way Victor suggests I have
no doubt that RTL will be the winner, but RTAI will continue to live.
Should he go the way I like, we all would be the winner and RTL will be
out. For that take into account that Victor has claimed that Linus is in
contact with him and is active at Linux meetings and conferences, while:
I never got an answer to my mails to Linus; I do not want to sell RTAI;
I will never spend a cent to go to any LINUX meetings, neither to push
RTAI nor to know what's going on. I am enough with what truly opened I
find on the network and of the contact through this and other lists.
(BTW, the friends at NMT should be praised for keeping this list opened
and unmoderated.)
8) RTAI is and will remain basically an in house effort based primarily
on our in house needs, and on our amusement in developing it. As such it
will be always freely available and we would like people to use it and
help us in getting it better by discovering bugs and building new
features around it, again provided that they will be available to
everyone. Right now something happened in that sense as I got a, for me,
nasty bug corrected by a user, some other users helped to fix a couple
of significant bugs and someone else added a POSIX interface to RTAI. It
is much more than we here expected but nothing was asked and nothing was
promised, and the all stuff remains, updated and free, at
http://www.aero.polimi.it/projects/rtai/.
9) If RTAI is going to be for a large base of committed users I like to
be acknowledged as the originator and become a contributor from then on,
and nothing else. In fact in such a case I'll hope that someone else,
more profitable that we all here are in software development and
maintenance, get the burden of keeping it up and alive.
10) Till I do not go to pension my primary goal is in the aerospace
field and at the Dipartimento di Ingegneria Aerospaziale del Politecnico
di Milano, not in computer science. This closes the loop because it
brings us at were RTAI is mostly used for experimental researches in
intelligent actively controlled structures, and aerospace systems in
general. All that by using the almighty, and hated, PC always missing
the old times when "DOS was more than enough, almost every thing was
done in FORTRAN and assembler, and .... if it could not be done that
way it could not be done at all".
Ciao, Paolo.
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