Xenomai 4 Poll

Since RTAI has reached the end of its life the way forward might be   Xenomai 4 

How many users might find this useful? it will be lots of work and we aren't sure yet how to support Mesa cards with it yet.

FYI, Mesa Ethernet does not work with RTAI kernel, so either way you look at it, RTAI was/is for software stepping mostly.
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Edit:
Personally i have in use a lot of parallel port machines, mostly with Ubuntu 10.04 still, and some new ones with Mint 19.2 and RTAI kernel, but i have much more with Mesa boards, and still i would say not to bother much with it as most of those machines with parallel port do not need the latest and greatest, the ISO for Ubuntu 6.04, 8.04, 10.04, and Wheezy are still available for download and all come with older versions of RTAI kernels.

I used to work with two machines that were stuck using older Ubuntu based Linuxcnc RTAI. Both ran servos, not stepper motors. One was because I could not get newer Linux kernels to work with the ISA IO card the machine was using, the other for extreme low latency to control torque mode servos. The ISA card machine was eventually upgraded to newer Mesa hardware and moved on to current Linux/Linuxcnc releases. The other is still running older RTAI.

Hi Bari,

I came across your February discussion about Xenomai 4 and LinuxCNC and just wanted to provide a quick update, especially regarding Mesa.

In the meantime, Hannes has implemented Xenomai 4 / EVL support in LinuxCNC, as well as OOB networking for Mesa HostMot2. PR #4199 was merged into master on August 5, 2026.

More information here:

forum.linuxcnc.org/38-general-linuxcnc-q...core?start=10#348629

So the question of Mesa support that you mentioned back then seems to have been resolved now.