Help Porting Application To Linux

[Paul Davis]

>> However, later on we need our kernel to run as a real time task by means
>> of RTAI, and we don't know if that is even possible with Wine/Winelib.
>> Anybody knows if such a thing is possible?
>
>What is RTAI? Realtiming a task in Linux is certainly possible but you
>need to be root to do it. I'm not sure that Wine implements this, you
>could have to do it using the right Linux calls. There was a thread on
>this last year, I think. 

No, this has nothing to do with Wine per se.

RTAI is a heavily-modified linux kernel, at least in the key areas of
interaction with hardware and interrupt handling.

To get "hard real time" performance from any Linux system requires (1)
a hard real version of Linux (RTLinux, RTAI etc) and (2) your task
runs as a special kind of process known to the RT kernel. This is
hard, but not impossible, to get going.

To get "soft real time" performance, you simply need a patched linux
kernel (the morton low latency patches for 2.4; nothing as good exists
for 2.6), and your task needs to run with SCHED_FIFO. there are lots
of people who do this already, and its not hard.

Finally, you do not need to be root to do this if you have a kernel
with capabilities enabled. This is (thankfully) becoming routine in
the world of linux audio, where we routinely need this ability.

Wine is just a library. It doesn't have anything to do with running
real time, except inasmuch as its code is often not RT-safe and so
should never be called from code that is supposed to be running RT.
The same can be said of any other library that you might use.

--p