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[Der Herr Hofrat <der.herr@hofr.at>]

>From owner-rtl Thu May 17 13:49:38 2001
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From: "Gearheart, Todd" <todd.gearheart@flightsafety.com>
To: "RTLinux newsgroup (E-mail)" <rtl@www.rtlinux.org>
Subject: "2nd Generation" flight simulator
Date: Thu, 17 May 2001 15:42:31 -0400
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Hello all,

Thought you might be interested...

I have completed the prototype for our 2nd generation flight simulator port.
This port is from Perkin Elmer 32xx series computers, to i386 based Linux
boxes. The prototype is a level B device that is currently running on a
PE3250 mini computer. 90% of the simulation is written in PE FORTRAN VII.
All of the math subroutines were written in PE micro code. My port required
I rewrite all of the math library in C. All of the FORTRAN modules are
"corrected" to the ANSI FORTRAN 77 standard by my own custom
conversion/porting utility.

I am compiling the FORTRAN modules with g77, and all C modules are compiled
with gcc. I have devised a method (using mbuff and a few tricks) that allows
the "user side" access to all the shared COMMONS allocated in kernel BSS
space at load time. I am using the same basic exec/debug configuration I
implemented on some of our earlier PDP11 code conversion/ports.

Because the g77/gcc compilers are efficient (especially when compared to
converting PDP11 assembler to C and then compiling the resultant C code).
The final simulation under Linux only occupies 270k of memory. One iteration
of all modules execute in under 400usec (on a 733mhz PIII). Worst case
jitter measured to date is 3usec.

The prototype box is running kernel 2.2.18 patched with 3.0pre10 RTL. The
simulator and debug package run well in an Xterm under Xfree 86 4.02. Our
final implementation will run in the X environment, utilizing utilities such
as emacs and ghostscript for software support and test verification.

Best Regards,
         Todd Gearheart
   Software Engineer Dept 041
   FlightSafety International
   Simulation Systems Division 
 Todd.Gearheart@Flightsafety.com
         (316) 612-5356