Re: RT patch acceptance

John Alvord
2005-06-01T06:24:06Z

On Tue, 31 May 2005 14:29:52 -0400, Steven Rostedt
<rostedt@goodmis.org> wrote:

>On Tue, 2005-05-31 at 19:51 +0200, Andrea Arcangeli wrote:
>> On Tue, May 31, 2005 at 01:42:59PM -0400, Steven Rostedt wrote:
>
>> > the integration level, and system level. Could you imagine what it
>> > would take to do this with Linux! Linux is much bigger than that code
>> > that ran the engine of an aircraft, and that testing took ten years!
>>
>> Indeed, that's why I believe hard-RT with preempt-RT is just a joke.
>
>I think the main problem with this thread is the definition of what
>people call hard-RT. I came from the defense industry and my version of
>what hard-RT is, is what I believe you think is hard-RT. But now I'm
>starting to work with more commercial industries, and I'm finding their
>terminology of what hard-RT is different. This really boils down to the
>terminology of hard and soft. Because, what I think of soft-RT is not
>as good as what the preempt-RT patch does. You need more too it.
>Probably, what I was talking about is diamond hard, and Ingo's RT patch
>is metal hard. PREEMPT is just wood hard and !PREEMPT is plastic hard*.
>Leaving MS Windows as feather hard ;-)
>
>The levels of RT is really what can be guaranteed and can be proved (or
>clearly demonstrated). What controls an aircraft is obviously going to
>have much more scrutiny than what is controlling your cell phone. I
>believe that what the -RT patch is giving us, is something that can give
>the Linux kernel more that it can guarantee, but not everything. Which I
>think is a good thing (and keeps me employed :-)
>
>I don't think that hard-RT in Linux would ever be used for life or death
>critical devices, like cat-scan machines or aircraft. But I do see it
>more for telecommunication and as others said, music. Before I left
>Lockheed, they were looking into using a version of a RT Linux for use
>for applications running on the plane (not controlling it). The
>requirements called for a soft-RT+ OS, but those requirements were much
>more stringent than what some so called hard-RTOS could produce.
>
>-- Steve
>
>* OK, maybe still not as hard as what is mentioned, but I couldn't think
>of better terminology. I do stand by what I called diamond and what I
>called feather. ;-)
>
>+ I know I contradicted myself by saying soft-RT is very weak and then
>the requirements for soft-RT were very hard. But I never agreed with
>Lockheed's use of the term soft-RT. But I guess, it was stressed that
>the OS didn't need to be tested the same, and as mentioned, the lack of
>terminology for this is the source of most problems, as is demonstrated
>on this thread!

It seems obvious to me that people are waving around soft qualitative
words when the reality is that only a quantitative specification is
possible. And nothing is 100%, it is always a distribution of
potential results. Any modern processor will have fluctuations in the
sub-microsecond range. A work of ram might have a single-bit error
[Thank you Mr X-ray from some collapsing star] and take a bit more
time then usual to do the ECC logic. A program proving system *might*
have an error. Every proper analysis should include an error estimate.

So an operating environment must have some
estimated/measured/calculated results from which an estimate can be
made on whether certain workload can be processed in the time alotted.
An audio application will have one requirement, flying an airplane is
another... All this hand-waving about hard versus soft RT just
exposes the prejudices and experience of each writer.

No offence...

john alvord