Re: [Xenomai] Reference Board

[Philippe Gerum]

On 02/05/2018 05:22 PM, Greg Gallagher wrote:

Hi,
After the recent meet up we had, I had an idea to help with a
couple of issues that we identified.  One issue that was brought up is
new users don't know how to get started with Xenomai, this impacts the
community of users and downstream feedback we get.  To help this
problem I'm proposing we choose one hardware board (maybe more later)
that we would ensure has proper Xenomai support.
This would ensure that new users are able to try out Xenomai on
real hardware and we (the Xenomai community) can make sure that it
works well and gives new users a great experience as they get started
with Xenomai.  Based on popularity and availability I suggest we start
with the Raspberry PI family of boards.  They are pretty common and
most people of this list probably have one or two (because of an
office clean out at work, I now have almost one of each variant).  The
wide availability would make it easy to (eventually) distribute the
testing across interested contributors and new Xenomai users.
The other nice benefit is the ability to test and maintain a good
set of example drivers for the raspberry PI platform.  We can ensure
that these RTDM drivers are using the most up to date interfaces and
best practices.  These could be examples that we point developers to
when they try to create RTDM drivers for their own platform.  I did a
quick audit of what we currently support today in Xenomai for
raspberry pi and we are only 3-4 drivers away from supporting most of
what's on the board.  Video drivers, GPU etc would be left to only the
Linux domain for now.
Creating and easy to use getting started wiki around the raspberry pi
would give us the ability to create interesting examples using Xenomai
that controls real hardware.  We could provide pre-built images based
on either buildroot or Ubuntu (I've done both of these for different
pi boards with good success).  This would give new users the ability
to get their hands dirty pretty quickly and with out having to build
everything from scratch.  Once they get comfortable with Xenomai then
they can move into building it from scratch and replacing bits and
pieces of the stock images.
The cost of doing this may seem steep at first, but I'm willing to
take on a good chunk of the work and then hopefully the maintenance
and testing won't prove to be too bad.  As the idea becomes more clear
hopefully other users or developers will help out.  The benefit of
doing this I believe will help with the ability to build a community
around Xenomai and start to create a larger base of downstream users.

If we think this is a good path to go down, I can post some more
information on what I've already started and what needs to be done.
Discussion and feedback would be appreciated :)



I would definitely support this effort, RPI seems a good showcase for 
illustrating how the dual kernel architecture can be leveraged to get 
good latency figures with little overhead from the rt machinery on the 
whole system. I have a couple of RPIs I can test on.


--
Philippe.

___
Xenomai mailing list
Xenomai@xenomai.org
https://xenomai.org/mailman/listinfo/xenomai

Re: [Xenomai] Reference Board

[Greg Gallagher]

Technically we should be able to hit them all.  The drivers don't
really differ, most of them target the bcm2835.  The larger work would
be testing, we would need to build and test for v6, v7 and v8.
Currently I've tested the Rpi2b and rpi zero w on Philippe's latest
I-ipipe branch.  I still need to verify RPI3 boots and works properly
with the newest ipipe for ARM64.  For the short term I'd like to start
with 4.14 since it's that latest LTS kernel and then we can look at
supporting older ones.  I'd like to support the SLTS kernel if we port
the ipipe to it.

-Greg

On Mon, Feb 5, 2018 at 11:52 AM, Lennart Sorensen
 wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 05, 2018 at 11:22:46AM -0500, Greg Gallagher wrote:
>> Hi,
>>After the recent meet up we had, I had an idea to help with a
>> couple of issues that we identified.  One issue that was brought up is
>> new users don't know how to get started with Xenomai, this impacts the
>> community of users and downstream feedback we get.  To help this
>> problem I'm proposing we choose one hardware board (maybe more later)
>> that we would ensure has proper Xenomai support.
>>This would ensure that new users are able to try out Xenomai on
>> real hardware and we (the Xenomai community) can make sure that it
>> works well and gives new users a great experience as they get started
>> with Xenomai.  Based on popularity and availability I suggest we start
>> with the Raspberry PI family of boards.  They are pretty common and
>> most people of this list probably have one or two (because of an
>> office clean out at work, I now have almost one of each variant).  The
>> wide availability would make it easy to (eventually) distribute the
>> testing across interested contributors and new Xenomai users.
>>The other nice benefit is the ability to test and maintain a good
>> set of example drivers for the raspberry PI platform.  We can ensure
>> that these RTDM drivers are using the most up to date interfaces and
>> best practices.  These could be examples that we point developers to
>> when they try to create RTDM drivers for their own platform.  I did a
>> quick audit of what we currently support today in Xenomai for
>> raspberry pi and we are only 3-4 drivers away from supporting most of
>> what's on the board.  Video drivers, GPU etc would be left to only the
>> Linux domain for now.
>> Creating and easy to use getting started wiki around the raspberry pi
>> would give us the ability to create interesting examples using Xenomai
>> that controls real hardware.  We could provide pre-built images based
>> on either buildroot or Ubuntu (I've done both of these for different
>> pi boards with good success).  This would give new users the ability
>> to get their hands dirty pretty quickly and with out having to build
>> everything from scratch.  Once they get comfortable with Xenomai then
>> they can move into building it from scratch and replacing bits and
>> pieces of the stock images.
>>The cost of doing this may seem steep at first, but I'm willing to
>> take on a good chunk of the work and then hopefully the maintenance
>> and testing won't prove to be too bad.  As the idea becomes more clear
>> hopefully other users or developers will help out.  The benefit of
>> doing this I believe will help with the ability to build a community
>> around Xenomai and start to create a larger base of downstream users.
>>
>>If we think this is a good path to go down, I can post some more
>> information on what I've already started and what needs to be done.
>> Discussion and feedback would be appreciated :)
>
> So would that be the Pi, Pi 2 or Pi 3?  A, or B or Zero?
>
> --
> Len Sorensen

___
Xenomai mailing list
Xenomai@xenomai.org
https://xenomai.org/mailman/listinfo/xenomai

Re: [Xenomai] Reference Board

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Mon, Feb 05, 2018 at 11:22:46AM -0500, Greg Gallagher wrote:
> Hi,
>After the recent meet up we had, I had an idea to help with a
> couple of issues that we identified.  One issue that was brought up is
> new users don't know how to get started with Xenomai, this impacts the
> community of users and downstream feedback we get.  To help this
> problem I'm proposing we choose one hardware board (maybe more later)
> that we would ensure has proper Xenomai support.
>This would ensure that new users are able to try out Xenomai on
> real hardware and we (the Xenomai community) can make sure that it
> works well and gives new users a great experience as they get started
> with Xenomai.  Based on popularity and availability I suggest we start
> with the Raspberry PI family of boards.  They are pretty common and
> most people of this list probably have one or two (because of an
> office clean out at work, I now have almost one of each variant).  The
> wide availability would make it easy to (eventually) distribute the
> testing across interested contributors and new Xenomai users.
>The other nice benefit is the ability to test and maintain a good
> set of example drivers for the raspberry PI platform.  We can ensure
> that these RTDM drivers are using the most up to date interfaces and
> best practices.  These could be examples that we point developers to
> when they try to create RTDM drivers for their own platform.  I did a
> quick audit of what we currently support today in Xenomai for
> raspberry pi and we are only 3-4 drivers away from supporting most of
> what's on the board.  Video drivers, GPU etc would be left to only the
> Linux domain for now.
> Creating and easy to use getting started wiki around the raspberry pi
> would give us the ability to create interesting examples using Xenomai
> that controls real hardware.  We could provide pre-built images based
> on either buildroot or Ubuntu (I've done both of these for different
> pi boards with good success).  This would give new users the ability
> to get their hands dirty pretty quickly and with out having to build
> everything from scratch.  Once they get comfortable with Xenomai then
> they can move into building it from scratch and replacing bits and
> pieces of the stock images.
>The cost of doing this may seem steep at first, but I'm willing to
> take on a good chunk of the work and then hopefully the maintenance
> and testing won't prove to be too bad.  As the idea becomes more clear
> hopefully other users or developers will help out.  The benefit of
> doing this I believe will help with the ability to build a community
> around Xenomai and start to create a larger base of downstream users.
> 
>If we think this is a good path to go down, I can post some more
> information on what I've already started and what needs to be done.
> Discussion and feedback would be appreciated :)

So would that be the Pi, Pi 2 or Pi 3?  A, or B or Zero?

-- 
Len Sorensen

___
Xenomai mailing list
Xenomai@xenomai.org
https://xenomai.org/mailman/listinfo/xenomai

[Xenomai] Reference Board

[Greg Gallagher]

Hi,
   After the recent meet up we had, I had an idea to help with a
couple of issues that we identified.  One issue that was brought up is
new users don't know how to get started with Xenomai, this impacts the
community of users and downstream feedback we get.  To help this
problem I'm proposing we choose one hardware board (maybe more later)
that we would ensure has proper Xenomai support.
   This would ensure that new users are able to try out Xenomai on
real hardware and we (the Xenomai community) can make sure that it
works well and gives new users a great experience as they get started
with Xenomai.  Based on popularity and availability I suggest we start
with the Raspberry PI family of boards.  They are pretty common and
most people of this list probably have one or two (because of an
office clean out at work, I now have almost one of each variant).  The
wide availability would make it easy to (eventually) distribute the
testing across interested contributors and new Xenomai users.
   The other nice benefit is the ability to test and maintain a good
set of example drivers for the raspberry PI platform.  We can ensure
that these RTDM drivers are using the most up to date interfaces and
best practices.  These could be examples that we point developers to
when they try to create RTDM drivers for their own platform.  I did a
quick audit of what we currently support today in Xenomai for
raspberry pi and we are only 3-4 drivers away from supporting most of
what's on the board.  Video drivers, GPU etc would be left to only the
Linux domain for now.
Creating and easy to use getting started wiki around the raspberry pi
would give us the ability to create interesting examples using Xenomai
that controls real hardware.  We could provide pre-built images based
on either buildroot or Ubuntu (I've done both of these for different
pi boards with good success).  This would give new users the ability
to get their hands dirty pretty quickly and with out having to build
everything from scratch.  Once they get comfortable with Xenomai then
they can move into building it from scratch and replacing bits and
pieces of the stock images.
   The cost of doing this may seem steep at first, but I'm willing to
take on a good chunk of the work and then hopefully the maintenance
and testing won't prove to be too bad.  As the idea becomes more clear
hopefully other users or developers will help out.  The benefit of
doing this I believe will help with the ability to build a community
around Xenomai and start to create a larger base of downstream users.

   If we think this is a good path to go down, I can post some more
information on what I've already started and what needs to be done.
Discussion and feedback would be appreciated :)

Thanks

Greg

___
Xenomai mailing list
Xenomai@xenomai.org
https://xenomai.org/mailman/listinfo/xenomai