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
