What is "xenomai"

Xenomai is a real-time development framework cooperating with the Linux kernel, to provide a pervasive, interface-agnostic, hard real-time support to user space applications, seamlessly integrated into the Linux environment.

The Xenomai project was launched in August 2001. In 2003 it merged with the Real-Time Application Interface ( RTAI) project to produce a production-grade real-time free software platform for Linux called RTAI/fusion, on top of Xenomai's abstract real-time operating system (RTOS) core. Eventually, the RTAI/fusion effort became independent from RTAI in 2005 as the Xenomai project.

Xenomai is based on an abstract RTOS core, usable for building any kind of real-time interface, over a nucleus which exports a set of generic RTOS services. Any number of RTOS personalities called “skins” can then be built over the nucleus, providing their own specific interface to the applications, by using the services of a single generic core to implement it.