Andrew Josey, Director of the Real-time and Embedded Systems Forum, reports on the most recent session of the Forum . . .

The Forum had an open session on the Wednesday, with the objective of generating interest from Europe matching that in the USA. Twenty people attended. The meeting covered a range of activities including the Forum's own work, the work in POSIX, as well as real-time developments in JAVA, embedded and real-time Linux and safety critical activities. On Thursday the forum met with the QoS Group after which the Forum members met as a working group with a number of people teleconferenced in.

The joint session with QoS Task Force was a lively session, there were many different views on the subject. The members agreed that they could work together and establish a joint working group. The initial approach going forward is to produce a canonical example or examples. This will identify a set of requirements to achieve QoS. An initial example was selected, in fact, a service to burn a CD-R across a network supporting multiple users. The QoS Task Force would think about a taxonomy coming up with the policies. The Forum would consider how to solve the problem with existing components (standards) and identify how these standards need to be augmented to add attributes of resource consumption. The result will be a mapping to measure behavior and hoe to control behavior.

The Forum worked on profiles. The members are developing a paper on how to state conformance requirements and select profiles. This will be progressed through teleconferences with the aim to complete the paper in the next quarter. It was noted that there is a need to investigate the POSIX 13 profiles and the EL/IX specification (not solely related to LINUX), to look for possible cooperation and integration, and to avoid duplication of work.

The Forum also furthered the work of its Security Interest Group. There are some things unique to real-time. This will be advanced by putting out a call for information with a straw man paper. The group will also validate its ideas by reference to the baseline specification from the Security Forum.

Looking at the way forward for the Forum, priorities are for a Roadmap, and for identifying requirements for better education and tools. Testing and certification is progressing well with tests for the real-time extensions to the specifications. There are also other opportunities which offer exciting prospects but which are currently under wraps. The next meeting of the Forum would be by teleconference on May 8.

We expect the forum to colocate with several groups in Austin, IEEE PASC and possibly SAE might meet at the same time. We have also started a discussion on real-time architecture patterns, with the option of holding a joint meeting with the Architecture Forum at a future meeting.

Further materials from the meeting are available here. Pre-Registration information for the next meeting will appear shortly, here.

Dates for the upcoming events are . . .

• May 8 Forum members teleconference 9am Pacific, 12am East coast, 5pm UK
  
• Week of July 16 — Austin, Texas — Forum Meeting
  
• Week of October 22 — Amsterdam, Holland, Forum Meeting

In Austin we are anticipating at least a two day working session of the forum . This will include a half-day general plenary session, and other sessions of the interest groups within the forum: a joint session with the QoS group (half a day) at which they will review the quality of service scenario developed since the Berlin meeting. The Security Interest Group will be evaluating the response to its call for information for security requirements for real-time and embedded systems. The profiles group is hoping to have a discussion regarding bringing together the EL/IX specification and the POSIX 1003.13 profiles. There may also be a joint session with the Architecture group on Real-time Architecture Patterns. A session on Safety-critical software will assess requirements and how the forum can address this area.

If you have input for what we should be addressing in Austin please contact either Andrew Josey or Joe Bergmann.

 
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