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Anatomy of real-time Linux architectures.

From soft to hard real-time

It's not that Linux® isn't fast or efficient, but in some cases fast just isn't good enough. What's needed instead is the ability to deterministically meet scheduling deadlines with specific tolerances. Discover the various real-time Linux alternatives and how they achieve real time—from the early architectures that mimic virtualization solutions to the options available today in the standard 2.6 kernel.

This article explores some of the Linux architectures that support real-time characteristics and discusses what it really means to be a real-time architecture. Several solutions endow Linux with real-time capabilities, and in this article I examine the thin-kernel (or micro-kernel) approach, the nano-kernel approach, and the resource-kernel approach. Finally, I describe the real-time capabilities in the standard 2.6 kernel and show you how to enable and use them.

-- Tom