Is it possible to write device drivers for my own PCI I/O board which can work with Real Time Windows Target?

Is it possible to write device drivers for my own PCI I/O board which can work with Real Time Windows Target?

The board is equipped with the PLX PCI chipset. The same chips are used by the Advantech PCI boards and they are available on the list of Real Time Windows Target supported boards. I would like to to create the PCI device driver for Real Time Windows Target.

Answer 1

[MathWorks Support Team]

This enhancement has been incorporated in Release 2006b (R2006b). For previous product releases, read below for any possible workarounds:

It is very difficult to write these drivers. There are two sets of problems:

1. If you have DLL and kernel-mode drivers, these are to be used with MS Windows and are therefore unusable for the Real Time Windows Target. The Real Time Windows Target is a (small) real-time operating system of its own; it just shares the computer with Windows. Hence it cannot use Windows DLLs and drivers that are not suitable for real-time operation.

2. The only option is to program the board at the register level (directly to the hardware). All Real Time Windows drivers do it this way. If you are able to do this, then there may be problems with accessing these registers. If the registers are I/O-mapped, there is no problem. However, when the registers are memory-mapped it is necessary to map this memory region to Real Time Windows address space, something we do not currently support for user-written drivers.

However, if the board you are trying to write the driver for is used relatively often, please submit the board information to our Technical Support staff who will forward it to our development staff so they can consider writing the driver for this board in the future.

For a list of supported boards, see the following URL:

https://www.mathworks.com/products/simulink-desktop-real-time.html

Click on "Supported Hardware".