Dear ...,
I am a student in Mech. Eng., Kansas State Univ., and I'm working on
developing software for a GPS-based avionics package. Initially, I was told
to develop all the software in Windows NT because "the people who give us
our research money say so". One of the requirements for the software package
was that it had to run in "hard real time". Well, I built the software
package, with multiple threads and timers and critical sections and
asynchronous I/O and memory page locking and all the rest of the thread
timing/synchronization tools that I needed. And unfortunately, after I built
the whole package in the Win32 API, I started testing, and the results were
disastrous: the timing errors were on the same order of magnitude as the
desired computational time period! I guess I learned the "hard way" that
Windows NT can't be used for "hard real-time" applications (excuse the pun).
I then found out about RT Linux, and the performance of RT Linux seems to be
simply superior to anything I have achieved with NT. So I was asked by my
advisors to port the software to RT Linux. I need to mention that both
myself and my advisors are "mechanical engineering" people: we know
absolutely nothing about operating systems. We "think" that both RT Linux
and Windows NT support POSIX, and hence we "think" it makes sense to port
the software to POSIX first, then move it over to RT Linux (our software
also uses MFC for displays, so we figured out that by porting to POSIX,
running it within NT, and THEN worrying about doing the rest of the porting,
the task will be simpler). We are also aware that for real-time
applications, we need POSIX.4. So I guess my questions are:
1-Does RT Linux support POSIX.4? If yes, does NT also support it?
2-What strategy would you recommend for porting the software?
3-Our software needs to communicate with 10 GPS receivers simultaneously
through COM connections. How hard is it to develop Linux drivers for
special-purpose serial boards?
Finally, thank you very much.
Sincerely Yours,
Hosam K. Fathy.
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