Real-Time CORBA Support in TAO

Support for OMG Real-Time CORBA 1.0 specification is currently being added to TAO.  The implementation effort is in full gear, so please check back often - these pages are updated frequently.  For a list of recently added features and work in progress see the Current Status section below.

As usual, questions, comments, and contributions should be posted to the comp.soft-sys.ace newsgroup, and bug reports can be submitted either through our web-based bug-tracking system (best) or by filling out the TAO/PROBLEM-REPORT-FORM and posting it to the newsgroup.  Please indicate "RTCORBA" in the component field when submitting a bug report.

Points of contact for the project are:

• Angelo Corsaro - collocation and policy encoding into ior
• Irfan Pyarali - POA threadpools and RT POA
• Marina Spivak - all other features and online documentation

Current Status 

Status last updated on: $Date$

Recently Completed

Items completed during the past 3-4 weeks.  (For a complete list of supported features see this section).

• Online Documentation
• New tests
• New collocation scheme
• Private Connections
• Explicit Binding
• RT Mutex

In Progress

Supported Features

Following is the complete list of features from the Real-Time CORBA 1.0 specification that are currently supported in TAO.  (These do not include work in progress).

• Real-Time ORB
• Real-Time POA
• Real-Time Current
• Priority Mappings
• Client_Propagated Priority Model
• Server_Declared Priority Model
• Server Protocol Policy
• Client Protocol Policy
• Priority Banded Connections
• Explicit Binding
• Private Connections
• Invocation Timeout
• RT Mutex

Unsupported Features

The following features are not currently supported, and there are no immediate plans for their implementation:

• POA Threadpool request buffering
• POA Threadpool thread borrowing
• Priority Transforms
• ORBinit command-line option

Future Work

1. Improve current RT CORBA implementation through benchmarking and optimizations, resolving known bugs and issues, adding examples, and other enhancements.
2. Implement an alternative real-time orb architecture using a queue-per-lane approach, as described in the TAO Real-Time Architecture section.  In this approach, each threadpool lane owns a queue, while I/O resources are being shared among all the threadpool lanes of the same priority within a server. Strategize TAO to use either queue-per-lane or reactor-per-lane implementation, and compare the two.
3. As both real-time and fault tolerance implementations mature separately, explore issues in combining them, and, ultimately, enable TAO to provide applications with both real-time and fault tolerance support at the same time.

Last modified: $Date$