Hi Matt On Wednesday 08 February 2006 14:12, Matt Timmermans wrote:

I'm writing a new stepper driver on BDI 4.38, so I can run my x10 microstepping Gecko drives on the P266 laptop that I have allocated to the purpose.

With a P266, you might want to consider running xfce4, evilwm, or one of the other lightweight window managers - I fear KDE will suck up too much in the way of resources.. The downside is no pretty desktop icons to launch EMC with.

The effort has taught me what a pain it is to get a patched kernel and EMC running from available source and information.  Now that I've figured out that I don't have to patch the kernel or adeos, I can use BDI, and in thanks for all the hard work that must have gone into it, I'm willing to release the driver under GPL when it's done.

BDI-4 is an ongoing project, and with a little help, we aim to release BDI-4.40 early in the summer. Things have settled down with Debian declared Sarge as stable, and the RTAI team are moving ever closer to a final release of rtai-3.3. EMC it's self is undergoing quite a bit of work in an attempt to resolve a number of outstanding issues, although it is possible some of the more radical changes won't be ready in time..

Are you guys still accepting code submissions for the BDI branch of EMC?  If so, what's the best way to go about that?

Currently, patches (preferably with -uw flags), complete files, or source tarballs are acceptable - Contact me off list and we can get you up to speed with some of the changes in the pipeline that might affect the implementation of a new driver.

Also a little technical question: freqmod has an empty function called freqsig().  What's that for?

The RTAI scheduler will call freqsig() when freqfunc() becomes the active task. Within the context of freqmod (and EMC generally), this feature is not used, hence a dummy function. In more complex multithreaded RT applications, this could be used to service interrupts, initialise variables, or do nothing. Regards, Paul. -- From the Klingon book of C: Klingon function calls do not have 'parameters' - they have 'arguments' - and they ALWAYS WIN THEM.