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Peter Soetens
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Initial v2.5.0 release notes
Signed-off-by: Peter Soetens <[email protected]>
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‎NEWS

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The Orocos Real-Time Toolkit v2.4.0
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The Orocos Real-Time Toolkit v2.5.0
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===================================================
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This is the fourth major release of the RTT 2.x release cycle. It is part of
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the Orocos Toolchain v2.4, see http://www.orocos.org/toolchain
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This is the fifth major release of the RTT 2.x release cycle. It is part of
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the Orocos Toolchain v2.5, see http://www.orocos.org/toolchain
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for all necessary information.
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*******************************************************************

‎doc/xml/orocos-rtt-changes.xml

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"http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.3/docbookx.dtd"
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[
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<!ENTITY orocos "<acronym>Orocos</acronym>">
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<!ENTITY oldversion "2.3">
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<!ENTITY version "2.4">
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<!ENTITY oldversion "2.4">
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<!ENTITY version "2.5">
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]
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>
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<listitem><para><ulink url="http://www.orocos.org/stable/documentation/rtt/v2.1.x/doc-xml/orocos-rtt-changes.html">Toolchain 2.1 Changes</ulink></para></listitem>
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<listitem><para><ulink url="http://www.orocos.org/stable/documentation/rtt/v2.2.x/doc-xml/orocos-rtt-changes.html">Toolchain 2.2 Changes</ulink></para></listitem>
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<listitem><para><ulink url="http://www.orocos.org/stable/documentation/rtt/v2.3.x/doc-xml/orocos-rtt-changes.html">Toolchain 2.3 Changes</ulink></para></listitem>
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<listitem><para><ulink url="http://www.orocos.org/stable/documentation/rtt/v2.4.x/doc-xml/orocos-rtt-changes.html">Toolchain 2.4 Changes</ulink></para></listitem>
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</itemizedlist>
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</para>
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</section>
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whole toolchain and all your applications in order to use this release.
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</para>
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<note><para>
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<emphasis>Take care that all previously built components and plugins in the lib/orocos directory and subdirectories
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are removed, since the deployment/plugin logic may want to load it. Especially on 'ROS' systems, which have
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such files in their lib/ directory.</emphasis>
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<emphasis>Take care that all previously built components and plugins in the &lt;install&gt;/lib/orocos directory and subdirectories
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are removed, since the plugin loader may not find older versions. Especially on 'ROS' systems, which have
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such files in their &lt;packagename&gt;/lib/ directory.</emphasis>
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</para></note>
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</listitem>
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<listitem>
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<para>
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There are issues with plugin loading on the Mac OS-X platform which might have been fixed
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with this release. We invite Mac users to test the Orocos toolchain on their platform and
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to submit bug reports if some functionality does not work.
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</para>
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</listitem>
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<listitem>
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<para>
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We have confirmed reports of compilation time regressions when using GCC. We are looking into reducing them.
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You can speed-up compilation times of components by including the 'Types.hpp' files of the typekits you
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are using in data ports, properties or operations. For example:
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<programlisting>
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#include &lt;rtt/typekit/Types.hpp> // Speeds up compiling components using regular C types
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#include &lt;geometry_msgs/typekit/Types.hpp> // Speeds up compiling ROS geometry message types (depends on rtt_ros_integration_geometry_messages)
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</programlisting>
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You can only attach one callback to an EvenPort, during the addEventPort() function call.
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If you need multiple call-backs, you need to call these yourself from the function you've
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provided to addEventPort(). In this regard, the port->getNewDataOnPortEvent() call has
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been removed. You can enable it by defining ORO_SIGNALLING_PORTS in the cmake
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configuration step, but this feature will be removed eventually.
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</para>
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</listitem>
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</itemizedlist>
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<section>
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<title>
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<emphasis>Changes in rtt/os/oro_atomic.h atomics headers</emphasis>
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</title>
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<para>
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The atomic operations have been refactored in order to suit future maintainability.
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The GCC-specific implementations have been rewritten in order to use the intrinsics.
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For this, the oro_atomic.h and oro_system.h headers were removed and a new header,
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oro_arch.h is in place for each target to implement the required atomics.
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</para>
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</section>
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</section>
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<section>
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<title>Improvements</title>
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<itemizedlist>
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<listitem>
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<para>
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<emphasis>Building of executables on ROS systems using the UseOrocos cmake macros
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has been improved such that <command>rosrun</command> will no longer offer two options.
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If you upgrade OCL in-tree, In order to delete the old executables, use <command>git clean -xdf</command>
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and then rebuild.</emphasis>
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<emphasis>Switching between OROCOS_TARGET configurations is now more robust.</emphasis>
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In environments where multiple OROCOS_TARGET are possible (for example xenomai/gnulinux),
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the OROCOS_TARGET environment variable can be set and will be picked up by the UseOrocos.cmake
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macros.
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</para>
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</listitem>
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<listitem>
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<para>
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<emphasis>ROS_ROOT is no longer influencing your build, unless you're in a ROS_PACKAGE_PATH</emphasis>
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In &oldversion;, the build system would switch to ROS-style if the user had defined the
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ROS_ROOT environment variable. In &newversion;, the build system will only switch if the
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package being built is a ROS package, ie, it is underneath the ROS_PACKAGE_PATH.
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</para>
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<para>
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This allows better integration with AutoProj.
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</para>
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</listitem>
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<listitem>
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<para>
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<emphasis>ROS package builds no longer install in a &lt;package&gt;/install subdirectory</emphasis>
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All Orocos Toolchain ROS packages now install in the &lt;orocos-toolchain&gt;/install directory.
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As such both ROS and non-ROS builds have the same directory layout. You can still use 'rosrun'
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to run an OCL program, since these are still available in the package as well.
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</para>
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<para>
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This allows better integration with AutoProj.
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</para>
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</listitem>
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<listitem>
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<para>
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<emphasis>RTT builds with clang++ 2.9</emphasis>
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This allows you to speed up RTT builds significantly.
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</para>
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<para>
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This allows better integration with AutoProj.
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</para>
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</listitem>
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</itemizedlist>
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<itemizedlist>
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<listitem>
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<para>
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The data flow port implementation has been optimized in order to reduce the number of copies to a
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minimum.
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An important fix was applied when two or more output ports were connected to one
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input port, which led to dropping data samples from time to time.
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</para>
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</listitem>
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</itemizedlist>
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</section>
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<section>
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<title>Data Types, Toolkits and Typekits</title>
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<itemizedlist>
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<listitem>
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<para> The Typekits now support fixed size arrays better. Especially, there is no need anymore for having
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one typekit for each size of an array. The ROS fixed-size array implementation in Electric makes use of
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this feature.</para>
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<para>
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There are fixes for the serialization of complex properties (structs and sequences) into the XML file format.
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For this, there was some class-reordering in the TypeInfo hierarchy, but it should remain transparant
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for existing users.
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</para>
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</listitem>
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<listitem>
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<para>
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A bug in the Signal implementation lead to a segfault when removing an event port from a TaskContext.
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This has been fixed.
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</para>
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</listitem>
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</itemizedlist>
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</section>
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<section>
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<title>Data Types, Toolkits and Typekits</title>
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<title>Operating Systems</title>
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<itemizedlist>
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<listitem>
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<para> The <classname>RTT::rt_string</classname> type has been added to the type system,
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allowing real-time string manipulations in scripts. It has the same featureset as the std string
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type, but uses the real-time memory allocators. You can create an rt_string as such:
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<programlisting> var rt_string test = rt_string("Testit!") </programlisting>
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You can pass an rt_string where is a string is expected and the other way around. Creating
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the rt_string will always be hard real-time.
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<para>
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There were the usual fixes for new compilers or header locations for
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all Operating Systems: Linux, Mac OS-X and Win32.
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</para>
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</listitem>
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<listitem>
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<para> The Posix MQueue transport for flow ports is now supported through orogen/typegen
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using a generic transport plugin. It relies on the type specific typelib transport, which is generated
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automatically when you use orogen/typegen. The traditional MQueue transport remains in place as well.
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<para>
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The CPU affinity Thread function for Xenomai is implemented but not yet stable. We
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are delving into this but already provide it to allow more testing.
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</para>
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</listitem>
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<listitem>
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<para>
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Xenomai threads now run with a default stack size of 128kb, instead of 32kb. This may still
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be too little if you have scripts which load scripts or have heavy stack use. In that case,
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use the <classname>RTT::os::Thread</classname>::setStackSize function before creating a new Thread/Activity.
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</para>
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</listitem>
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</itemizedlist>
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</section>
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<section>
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<title>Operating Systems</title>
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<itemizedlist>
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<listitem>
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<para>
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It's now possible to set CPU Affinity when creating an activity or a thread. If your
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OS abstraction supports it, changing the affinity at run-time is possible too. Currently,
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this is only implemented for gnulinux targets. On other targets, setCPUAffinity() will have
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no effect, until their OS interface makes use of it.
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The Xenomai main() thread now runs with priority 0 instead of 10. Since this is the
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thread which is doing all the setup work, it shouldn't have defaulted
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to a real-time priority.
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</para>
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<listitem>
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<para>
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As of this version, Orocos will use the GCC intrinsics API in order to implement atomic
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operations on data, when GCC 4.1.0 or newer is available.
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There have been a bunch of patches for Mac OS-X, but more testing is still necessary.
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</para>
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<itemizedlist>
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<listitem>
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<para>
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There were fixes in the parsing of the assignment operator. Especially the case a = b = c
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has now been fixed.
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RTT script functions can now be decorated with 'global', 'local' and 'export'. 'local' is the
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default and keeps a function local to the scripting service. 'export' attaches the script
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function to the interface of the component it belongs to. 'global' puts the function in
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the GlobalService, such that other scripts in other components can use it directly, without
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the need to refer to a component.
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</para>
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</itemizedlist>
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<itemizedlist>
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<listitem>
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<para>
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Release 2.4.0 now has Lua 1.0-beta3, providing an as-good-as-stable API for creating
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and using components and applications. A <ulink
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Consult the <ulink
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url="http://www.orocos.org/wiki/orocos/toolchain/orocostoolchainluacookbook">LuaCookbook</ulink>
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has been put online which is updated regularly.
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for the latest changes
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</para>
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<listitem>
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<para>
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You are now allowed to write:
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<programlisting> tc:provides():setPeriod( 0.01 ) -- calls operation immediately </programlisting>
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instead of:
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<programlisting> op = tc:provides():getOperation("setPeriod") -- 'getOperation syntax'
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op(0.01) -- calls 'setPeriod'</programlisting>
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Both forms for calling operations is supported. The former is convenient, but may be slower,
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the latter can be used in loops where the operation is first stored and then called with an
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argument later on.
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The TLSF branch of Lua has been merged, which will allow hard real-time script execution in the near
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future. Further minor releases will pollish this feature more.
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</para>
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</itemizedlist>
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</section>
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<section>
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<title>Deployment</title>
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<itemizedlist>
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<para>
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You can now kickOut any component, also if it was created using a script. A bug was fixed
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which did not shut down components which were not loaded using XML.
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Your scripts have now access to the RTT globals using the <programlisting>rtt.globals</programlisting>
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table. These are the scheduler types, data flow &amp; operations return codes and constants for initializing
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ConnectionPolicy objects.
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</para>
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</section>
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<section>
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<title>TaskBrowser</title>
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<title>Deployment</title>
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<itemizedlist>
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<listitem>
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<para>
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Allows to display all values in hex format using the .hex taskbrowser command.
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</para>
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</listitem>
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<listitem>
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<para>
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Tab-completion on services has been fixed. Properties did not show up.
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There is a new operation called 'setActivityOnCPU' which takes an affinity parameter
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as well.
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</listitem>
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</itemizedlist>
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</section>
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<section>
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<title>Logging Service</title>
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<title>Reporting</title>
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<para>
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A new logger for logging to Apache ChainSaw has been added, the
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<classname>OCL::logging::Log4cxxAppender</classname> component. You need ChainSaw running before
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your application starts in order to see the log events in the GUI. Any number of
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applications in your network may log to ChainSaw. For more details about logging in
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Orocos, see the <ulink
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url="http://www.orocos.org/wiki/rtt/rtt-20/real-time-logging/using-real-time-logging">
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LoggingService wiki page</ulink>.
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The reporting component has been rewritten such that it behaves consistently. When
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being periodic, it will sample all input ports at the frequency it runs. When being
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triggered, it will log the ports which have new data.
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</para>
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</itemizedlist>

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