>> However, later on we need our kernel to run as a real time task by means >> of RTAI, and we don't know if that is even possible with Wine/Winelib. >> Anybody knows if such a thing is possible? > >What is RTAI? Realtiming a task in Linux is certainly possible but you >need to be root to do it. I'm not sure that Wine implements this, you >could have to do it using the right Linux calls. There was a thread on >this last year, I think.
No, this has nothing to do with Wine per se. RTAI is a heavily-modified linux kernel, at least in the key areas of interaction with hardware and interrupt handling. To get "hard real time" performance from any Linux system requires (1) a hard real version of Linux (RTLinux, RTAI etc) and (2) your task runs as a special kind of process known to the RT kernel. This is hard, but not impossible, to get going. To get "soft real time" performance, you simply need a patched linux kernel (the morton low latency patches for 2.4; nothing as good exists for 2.6), and your task needs to run with SCHED_FIFO. there are lots of people who do this already, and its not hard. Finally, you do not need to be root to do this if you have a kernel with capabilities enabled. This is (thankfully) becoming routine in the world of linux audio, where we routinely need this ability. Wine is just a library. It doesn't have anything to do with running real time, except inasmuch as its code is often not RT-safe and so should never be called from code that is supposed to be running RT. The same can be said of any other library that you might use. --p