Introduction to Realtime Linux

Introduction to Realtime Linux - Jan Altenberg, linutronix GmbH

Linux became the fastest growing platform in the embedded sector. One reason for this success is the huge number of supported hardware platforms. In addition it became very easy to get hard realtime capabilities to Linux. The PREEMPT_RT patch became the de-facto standard for Linux and realtime. It is available for every second kernel release and will be included in the mainline kernel in the near future. This talk gives an overview of the history of realtime Linux, the different approaches and the advantages of the PREEMPT_RT patch in comparison to other approaches. Furthermore it shows the latency results on a modern Cortex A9 platform for PREEMPT_RT and Xenomai (a so called dual-kernel approach). These measurements prove, that PREEMPT_RT is much easier to use and it can achieve latencies which are comparable to the latencies of dual kernel approaches like Xenomai or RTAI.

About Jan Altenberg

Jan Altenberg has more than 10 years experience in developing and maintaining Embedded Linux systems. He studied information technologies at the University of Cooperative Education in Stuttgart (Germany). From 2002 - 2006 he was involved in the OCEAN project, a european research project, which defined an open controller platform based on Realtime Linux and Realtime CORBA. Since 2007 he is working for Linutronix as an embedded engineer, trainer and project manager