Re: RT patch acceptance

Bill Huey
2005-05-28T05:48:32Z

On Sat, May 28, 2005 at 02:43:30PM +1000, Nick Piggin wrote:
> If you are talking about soft-RT, or things running on Linux today,
> then sure they'll keep working. Even some or all of PREEMPT_RT may
> be merged into the Linux guest too, for better soft-RT. I haven't
> been arguing against that.

Hard RT guarantee are very possible, not in years, but months (possibly
already) under constraints previously outlined.

[dual complexity issues snippeted]

> I agree we'll never have a fully functional hard-RT Linux kernel.
> But this thread hasn't been about whether or not the RT task knows
> what it is doing (we assume it does), but the possibility of making
> more parts of the kernel able to provide some RT guarantee (ie. so
> said RT task *can* use more functionality).

No sane RT app person is going to call into the kernel and expect
guarantees in a general purpose system. Folks doing this kind of
RT work will have at least a path that they can follow to *possibly*
make this happen. It's all conjecture at the moment and it won't be
known until somebody takes a shot at it and all associated kernel
issues. It's most definitely a worthy project.

If this happens Linux would be an ideal kernel for digital video
recorders and such.

bill