Please note: This article is adapted from John Lombardo's upcoming book, Embedded Linux, which will be published by New Rider's press in 2001. The book describes why embedded system developers should seriously consider using Linux in embedded applications, explains how to go about using the Linux kernel in an embedded design, and examines some of the hardware and software choices that need to… (more…)

A brand new embedded Linux software company recently joined the growing number of Asian companies that are embedding Linux within consumer Internet and information appliances. During the week of Comdex Fall 2000, Taiwan-based Esfia unleashed a volley of product and technology announcements and launched its new website ((more…)

In the framework of our research on high-gain observers for nonlinear systems we have reached the final development step consisting of a real-time implementation in Linux. The results presented in this paper were obtained using RTAI-lab and the Scilab/Scicos CACSD environment on a series-connected DC motor. (more…)

Linux as a general-purpose operating system is designed to support the services required by most generic applications. Today, there is a new generation of real-time applications that are interactive, computation-intensive, and I/O-bound. In the past years, operating system research has addressed each of these challenges in turn. (more…)

This paper describes a real-time extension to Linux called LITMUSRT, which is being designed to support real-time workloads on multiprocessor and multicore platforms. The recent shift by chip makers to multicore designs, combined with building interest within the open-source community in supporting real-time features in Linux, makes this research quite timely. (more…)

With the maturing of the Realtime Preemption Patches (RT-Preempt) and their stepwise integration to the Mainline Linux kernel since version 2.6.18, we set out to answer the questions:

• How good is RT-Preempt with respect to the worst-case latency?
• How expensive is RT-Preempt with respect to a possible performance degradation of the system?

Taking that a lot of the preemption techniques… (more…)

Traditionally, safety critical systems have been constructed from low volume hardware and software components specifically designed for safety critical systems. Almost all are closed systems, and the exact designs and source code are not available for analysis or comparison; we can only evaluate the reliability based on published reports of accidents attributed to the control systems. (more…)

This paper presents technical solutions for an autonomous robot running GNU/Linux. While the majority of article focused on the software implementation, we will slightly describe some of our mechanical and electrical solutions as well. The paper outlines several interesting software built for embedded real- time application. (more…)

This work presents a position monitoring system to generate displays showing the position of trains, time between trains, seconds early/late for each train, and alarms. Alarms will be generated when trains are too close, unexpected events are received, or trains do not cross subsequent sensors when expected. (more…)

In the near future, smartphones will become good enough for most PC users' usual purposes and any device can be connected to Internet. Finally PC and smartphone will converge as the next generation handheld device, which will be always best connected. Symbian, Windows Mobile, Linux, RIM, MacOS are the top 5 OSes, which compete in this fast-growing market segment. (more…)

The Dresden Real-Time Operating Systems Project (DROPS) is a research project aiming at the support of applications with Quality of Service requirements. In the DROPS project a key component is L4Linux, the Linux server on top of the L4 microkernel. Now DROPS could provide to concurrent execution of many instances of L4Linux like Xen but there is no feasible interface to implement communication between… (more…)

Automation technology lacks an established platform independent, high-level, object oriented real-time capable communication standard, which is based on standard Ethernet hardware and drivers. ACE/TAO is an Open Source implementation of the OMG Real-Time CORBA Specification and might fill this gap. (more…)

RTLinux-GPL1 is an RTOS which uses a dual-kernel approach, that is, executing a real-time kernel (RTLinux-GPL itself) jointly with a general purpose OS (Linux). By using this approach, complex real-time application with both, hard and soft real-time requirements can be implemented easier. (more…)

Real-time I/O scheduling, specifically disk scheduling, has frequently received far less attention than other aspects of real-time theory. Nevertheless, several proposals have addressed this area meaning to merge the real-time CPU scheduling along with traditional I/O scheduling to provide real-time disk response. (more…)

The processor Cell Broadband Engine (Cell/B.E.) is used inside the Playstation 3. The Cell/B.E. is a multi-core processor with heterogenous cores. Each core has its own memory. But all cores can communicate with each other using a high speed bus. (more…)