Re: RT patch acceptance

Christoph Hellwig
2005-05-24T05:47:29Z

On Mon, May 23, 2005 at 04:14:26PM -0700, Daniel Walker wrote:
> Hello World!
>
> I went to see Andrew Morton speak at Xerox PARC and he indicated that
> some of the RT patch was a little crazy . Specifically interrupts in
> threads (Correct me if I'm wrong Andrew). It seems a lot of the
> maintainers haven't really warmed up to it.
>
> I don't know to what extent Ingo has lobbied to try to get acceptance
> into an unstable or stable kernel. However, since I know Andrew is cold
> to accepting it , I thought I would ask what would need to be done to
> the RT patch so that it could be accepted?
>
> I think the fact that some distributions are including RT patched
> kernels is a sign that this technology is getting mature. Not to mention
> the fact that it's a 600k+ patch and getting bigger everyday.
>
> I'm sure there are some people fiercely opposed to it, some of whom I've
> already run into. What is it about RT that gets people's skin crawling?
> It is a configure option after all.

Personally I think interrupt threads, spinlocks as sleeping mutexes and PI
is something we should keep out of the kernel tree. If you want such
advanced RT features use a special microkernel and run Linux as user
process, using RTAI or maybe soon some of the more sofisticated virtualization
technologies.