Software implementation of a time-triggered ethernet controller
Petr Grillinger, Astrit Ademaj, Klaus Steinhammer, Hermann Kopetz · 2006
In this paper we present the architecture of a software implementation of a Time-Triggered Ethernet (TTE) controller. The presented TTE controller offers hardreal time communication guarantees using 100Mbit Ethernet. The presented implementation deploys a single board computer with the x86 architecture and runs under the Linux kernel with the real-time application interface (RTAI) patch. Although this software implementation of the TTE controller cannot utilize the full bandwidth of 100Mbit Ethernet, it has several benefits when compared to a hardware solution, such as shorter development time, flexibility in the design changes, low cost, and portability. In this paper, we focus on the particular problems of achieving hard real-time guarantees on the x86 architecture in a RTAI Linux environment and demonstrate the bottlenecks by considering the implementation of the TTE communication controller as a case study.