Originally named Xenodaptor, the project that would soon become Xenomai was announced on August 2001 by Philippe Gerum. The Xenomai 1.0 milestone was reached in March 2002.

In its early days, Xenomai used to be an add-on component to real-time Linux variants for emulating traditional RTOS, originally based on a dual kernel approach. Over the years, it has become a full-fledged real-time Linux framework on its own terms, also available on single/native kernel systems.

Adeos/I-pipe is a companion project to Xenomai, which implements a key component of a dual kernel configuration: the interrupt virtualization mechanism delivering high priority events to the Xenomai co-kernel with short and predictable latencies. Xenomai was the first real-time extension to be ported over the I-pipe, followed a year after by RTAI.

In the 2003-2005 period, the original core team members - namely Gilles Chanteperdrix and Philippe Gerum - contributed significantly to the RTAI project, before focusing back on Xenomai’s own goals, which led to the release of Xenomai 2.0 in October 2005.

Since then, Xenomai has been actively maintained and ported to various CPU architectures, for a user base mainly involved in the industrial automation industry.

Xenomai is currently maintained by Jan Kiszka <jan.kiszka@siemens.com>.