This whitepaper by Dr. Doug Locke, Vice President of Technology at TimeSys Corp., explores the changes recently made to the mainstream Linux development kernel to improve its preemptibility, discusses the implications of these changes relative to embedded and real-time applications, and contrasts the recently adopted approach with that used in TimeSys Linux GPL. Locke writes . . .

” . . . we believe that this is an excellent step towards reducing the average latency of the Linux kernel and should provide numerous benefits for users of Linux in desktop and server distributions. However, we must note that although this patch will help reduce the average latency of the kernel, it does little to improve upon the maximum or 'worst-case' latency that is critical to developing embedded systems . . .”

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