[Xenomai-main] Xenomai questions

[Nau, Peter]

Hello,

I've learned about Xenomai some lately, having followed various links and read Philippe Gerum's excellent paper.  It seems like a brilliant concept.

I have some practical questions, but first, some background:

We have a medium/large VxWorks project that runs on a PC.  It uses the MetaWindow graphics package for its GUI primitives, which programmers here don't much like.  The application doesn't have hard real-time requirements, but we'd like to continue running it on an RTOS, and we'd like to move away from VxWorks (and MetaWindow), to an open-source, free system.  It occurred to me that Xenomai might be an ideal migration vehicle for us, allowing us to run legacy code in emulated VxWorks atop Xenomai, while concurrently running RTAI and Linux.

(An important background note: our application is a medical one, and it is subject to U.S. FDA scrutiny and regulations.  Conservative elements here are skeptical about open source, free software, but the point is that software quality control is essential, which we must often do ourselves.)

My questions:

• Is my vision a reasonable one? 
• Can the VxWorks code communicate with RTAI and Linux, and vice versa?  If so, what is the mechanism?
• How robust and reliable is Xenomai and its VxWorks emulation, at least for plain vanilla operations?
• Are other people using Xenomai, and is there an active or semi-active user community which might help answer questions and provide support, until we can do the same?

I'd appreciate any information and help, because, if it's viable, Xenomai (VxWorks) emulation could be an innovative and valuable solution for us.

Thank you!

Sincerely,

Peter

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