[LITMUS^RT] LITMUS^RT 2017.1

[Björn Brandenburg]

Hi everyone,

I’m happy to announce that LITMUS^RT 2017.1, the latest and greatest version of LITMUS^RT, has been released. This represents the tenth anniversary of the first public release of LITMUS^RT (yay!). Get it here:

	http://www.litmus-rt.org/download.html

Major changes since version 2016.1:
 
	• Rebased to Linux version 4.9. Major changes in “scheduling in progress” tracking and the hrtimer API, among many others.

	• Extend plugin API to allow plugins to optionally change task parameters at runtime via the task_change_params() plugin callback (opt-in, none of the stock plugins support this at the moment).

	• Improved handling of wake-ups and job releases triggered by clock_nanosleep().

	• Fix Feather-Trace compilation on ARM (Namhoon Kim, Andrea Bastoni).

	• Better tracking of job completions of sporadic tasks.

	• Basic support for random inter-arrival delays in rtspin.

	• Support clock_nanosleep() in rtspin (via -T option).

	• Improved argument handling in user-space tools.

	• Support for compiling liblitmus on ARM64.

	• Various new time-related helper functions in liblitmus such as ns2ms(), litmus_clock(), sleep_until_mono(), lt_sleep_until() etc.

Thanks a lot to Nathan Otterness for improving the installation instructions (http://www.litmus-rt.org/installation.html). 

There is also a significant change in development model: I’ve done away with the master branch in the kernel repo, which suffered from semi-regular rebasing and a nondescript name. Instead, the up-to-date branch is now called linux-4.9-litmus, which the expectation that any ports to later kernel versions will pick a new branch name. This has the advantage that (a) it is immediately clear what version of Linux this version of LITMUS^RT is based on and (b) this branch will never be rebased, which should make life easier for everyone. 

Enjoy!

- Björn