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 0.9.12 released
2010-04-20 19:18 - 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 20:00 - 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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RTnet 0.9.10 released
2008-04-13 16:24 - RTnet - Real-Time Networking for Linux
Here it comes, finally. No revolutionary new features, just steady enhancements and fixes. We have one new driver in this release, rt_at91eth, a fix for an ugly corruption in the ICMP code, and basically everything is aligned with the latest kernel and RTDM versions again.
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