A CORBA based architecture for distributed embedded systems using the RTLinux-GPL platform

This paper describes an architecture for distributed computing on the RTLinux-GPL(GPL version of RTLinux, hereafter RTLinux) platform. The proposed architecture implements the CORBA (common object request broker architecture) model of computation, more specifically the minimum CORBA specification for embedded systems, and also provide the extensions for real-time computing. Since RTLinux lacks networking capabilities, the architecture implements all the required functionality in a layered fashion: network drivers, TCP/IP stack and an ORB (object request broker). Most of this work consists on a set of partings of some widely known open source Linux projects to RTLinux: Linux Ethernet device drivers, the lwIP (lightweight IP) TCP/IP stack and ORBit, which is a C language implementation of CORBA. This paper also describes some ORBit modifications that make ORBit to comply with the minimum CORBA specification