Update: RTAI-5 support has been merged into mainline. The 2.7 and master branches build and run right out of the box. More info here.

New RTAI kernel packages are available for Debian Jessie, based on Linux 3.16.7 and RTAI 5.0-test1.

This new realtime kernel is not ready for widespread deployment yet. I’m soliciting early testing from developers and advanced users who are comfortable manipulating apt sources, installing kernel packages, and building linuxcnc from source.

In order to test it, you need to install Jessie (i386) using the regular debian.org installer, add “deb http://linuxcnc.org jessie base” to your sources.list, install the linux-image and rtai-modules packages from there, and reboot.

There are no debian packages of LinuxCNC for this new platform yet, but the branch “rtai-5” in our git repo works on it.

Report any results, success or failure, on IRC (#linuxcnc-devel) or on the developers mailing list.