RTnet

Hard Real-Time Networking for Real-Time Linux

RTnet is an Open Soure hard real-time network protocol stack for Xenomai and RTAI (real-time Linux extensions). It makes use of standard Ethernet hardware and supports several popular NIC chip sets, including Gigabit Ethernet. Moreover, Ethernet-over-1394 support is available based on the RT-FireWire protocol stack.

RTnet implements UDP/IP, TCP/IP (basic features), ICMP and ARP in a deterministic way. It provides a POSIX socket API to real-time user space processes and kernel modules.

To avoid unpredictable collisions and congestions on Ethernet, an additional protocol layer called RTmac controls the media access. A dedicated Ethernet segment is required to guarantee bounded transmission delays, but RTnet also includes a mechanism to tunnel non real-time traffic like TCP/IP over RTmac, thus allowing a "single-cable" solution for connecting control systems.

Some possible application domains are fieldbus replacements, distributed real-time computing, or video/audio streaming.

RTnet was originally developed by Ulrich Marx for his diploma thesis at the Institute for Systems Engineering, Real-Time Systems Group, University of Hannover (Germany). Now it is being maintained and improved by people at this institute and contributors all over the world.

News

RTnet 0.9.13 released
2012-09-12 11:31 - RTnet - Real-Time Networking for Linux
Yes, this was way too long since the last release. Too many changes piled up, too many people were forced to use a git snapshot. Will try to do better next time. Here are the changes of this release:
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RTnet 0.9.12 released
2010-04-20 12:18 - RTnet - Real-Time Networking for Linux
Yet another year passed since the last release, so it's definitely time to role out a new one. To make it short, the list of major changes:

- RT-TCP support
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RTnet 0.9.11 released
2009-04-15 13:00 - RTnet - Real-Time Networking for Linux
Almost exactly one year has passed since the last release, so quite a few changes piled up. We gained a some more drivers, performance and usability improvements were done and, of course, the usual kernel alignment took place.
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