From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Philippe Gerum Message-ID: Date: Tue, 21 Nov 2017 18:11:52 +0100 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Language: en-US Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Subject: [Xenomai] [RFC] RTnet, Analogy and the elephant in the room List-Id: Discussions about the Xenomai project List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , To: "Xenomai@xenomai.org" As the GIT commit history shows, there has been no sustained effort in maintaining several of the Xenomai I/O frameworks for several months (e.g. RTnet, analogy), even years in some cases, despite obvious bugs are still haunting the code base according to the mailing list. The situation has reached a point where I see no alternative to dropping them if the situation does not improve, because there is absolutely no point in this project shipping bit rot software that won't ever be fixed. Unfortunately, this is only the tip of the iceberg. Let's face it, since Gilles passed away last year, I have not been scaling to the Xenomai maintenance, development and documentation tasks, with the requirement of running my business in parallel. The solution to this serious problem is fitting the project to the available resources by narrowing its goal, or conversely, by growing the pool of contributors. In addition, we can rework the most tricky part of the implementation to make it simpler to maintain, better documented, drastically lowering the barrier on entry for new contributors, which is what I've been working on for a year with the 4th generation of the interrupt pipeline. Progress on this front has been significant already, but once again limited by the time I have been able to devote to this development so far. For the past 16 years, this project has lived on various types of contributions from only a few committed people and companies. At this chance, let's mention that people who have been deploying Xenomai in industrial applications owe a lot to Wolfgang Denk from Denx Engineering, Siemens's Jan Kiszka and Jorge Ramirez, who have supported the project in crucial ways directly or indirectly over the years, and still do. Xenomai as a dual kernel technology showcase has been quietly delivering on the promise of real-time Linux for more than a decade now, with marketing tools limited to showing decent code quality, good and reliable performance figures. As a result, to my current knowledge, Xenomai is present in a broad range of applications and systems: magnetic resonance scanners, 2D/3D printers, navigation & positioning, communication equipment, autonomous vehicles, control & automation systems in various plants. On the sad side of the story, this project has virtually become a one-man show the day Gilles - my long-time friend and hacking soul mate - left us. That show is too big for me to run it alone, which entails maintaining: - the interrupt pipeline for 7 CPU architectures - the Cobalt co-kernel - 4 APIs, plus the "copperplate" mediating layer - several real-time I/O frameworks, including CAN, RTnet, Analogy, SPI, GPIO - the documentation (which is currently unfriendly to newcomers, and stalled two years ago or so) - the website - the testing and release processes So, let's talk about the elephant in the room: the current situation of the Xenomai project is not viable in the long run. I can only encourage people who feel concerned about it to discuss openly the practical steps to best address this challenge. Thanks, -- Philippe.